The Charlottesville government is considering apologizing for its role in Massive Resistance, the failed attempt to keep Virginia public schools from becoming racially integrated, despite the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.
Assistant City Manager Maurice Jones, who is also organizing the city’s dialogue on race that will kick off in December, wrote the resolution that praises the students who first integrated the city’s schools and describes the preceding school closures as “disgraceful.” Councilors expressed an interest in August to acknowledge the 50th anniversary of Massive Resistance’s end.
Charlottesville was one of several Virginia school divisions that closed its all-white schools rather than integrate them.
“Certainly I wasn’t there but I chose to take the seat of a person who was there during that time,” Councilor Holly Edwards said in an interview. “It really is a powerful statement, because we’re acknowledging there’s a wrong.”
Because Mayor Dave Norris could not attend Monday’s meeting, the body will vote on the resolution on Oct. 5.
The state implemented Massive Resistance in response to the U.S. Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled against segregated schools, to avoid integration. Despite that U.S. District Court Judge John Paul ruled that the city’s schools must be integrated in 1956, former Gov. James Lindsay Almond Jr. closed Lane High School and Venable Elementary School on Sept. 19, 1958.
Councilor David Brown said that through his own research, he found that the City Council at that time did not just sit on its hands, but also pushed to keep the city’s schools segregated.
“It did want to defend the status quo,” Brown said. “I think it’s very appropriate that an apology be issued.”
The city’s schools were shut down for five months and the division stayed segregated for the rest of the academic year, but Paul ordered 12 black students to be integrated into the two schools on Sept. 5, 1959.
Resident Don Martin was one of them, and he entered the eighth grade at Lane High School on Sept. 8, 1959. He was one of three black students to do so at the school that is now home to the Albemarle County Office Building.
Compared with what was being said by the political establishment and the media 50 years ago, Martin said, the City Council passing a resolution apologizing for Massive Resistance “would be a complete reversal of those statements, of those positions, of those laws.”
“It’s good to see that happening,” Martin said.
Martin, along with others who were the first to integrate the city’s schools, will be discussing their experiences at a Saturday event at Venable to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Massive Resistance’s end.
“We’re not there for a full-blown condemnation of everything we went through, but it’s just something to recognize,” he said.
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