Addressing an injustice

Fifty years and one month after 12 Charlottesville youth bore the real, and the symbolic, weight of becoming the first black students to integrate city schools, City Council apologized for the conspiracy that had kept them from their rightful place in the classroom.
It was an emotional moment. Even though the injustice is half a century gone, its impact still resonates.
The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled against segregated schools in 1954, but the battle to implement that ruling was still being fought several years later. When a federal district judge ordered Virginia in 1956 to abide by the high court’s decision, the commonwealth instead embarked on a campaign of Massive Resistance.
Rather than comply, the state and several local governments — including Charlottesville — ordered schools to be closed.
Charlottesville shuttered its all-white Lane High School and Venable Elementary School for five months, before finally swaying to a court order to immediately allow 12 black students to attend those schools.
Three of the students went to Lane, and nine to Venable.
Try to imagine the emotions of those 12 young people as they walked through those doors, sat in those classrooms and dealt with teachers and students, many of whom, they knew, bitterly resented their presence.
The resolution passed this week by Council acknowledges the courage it must have taken for the students — as well as their parents and the NAACP, which supported them — to have endured those times.
The Council also acknowledged the “disgraceful act” of Massive Resistance and mourned the “pain that was caused … and all the wounds, known and unknown” that resulted. It apologized for the city’s role in that injustice and invoked the desire to “learn from the injustices of the past as we move forward together.”
Although rightly centering on the 12 students, the resolution does well to refer to other wounds, “known and unknown.”
The court-ordered breach in the barrier of segregation may have ended official discrimination in school admission, but it did not end de facto discrimination. Black students still had years of animosity to endure, and an uneven advance to negotiate toward equality. Even today we are still struggling with these issues.
And there was some damage done to white students who had their schooling interrupted as well. Many privileged white students, supported by tutors or private schools, were able to overcome the closing of the schools; poorer white students would not have had those same opportunities.
However, white students, even though losing several months of school, did not also have to bear the burden of being unwelcome, of being outsiders, of being the first to break a barrier that the majority did not want to see tumbled.
The first 12 students to walk through that barrier carried a proud but heavy burden, symbolizing as they did the end of one era and start of another.
City Council’s resolution of apology is another symbol — of injustice and regret, yes, but also of the very change that 12 courageous black students inaugurated 50 years and one month ago.