Memorial pays tribute to those who fought school segregation

RICHMOND

It was an awe-inspiring moment for 16-year-old Ann Laurence Baumer.

A rising junior at Virginia Beach’s Frank W. Cox High School, Baumer had just stepped down from having her picture taken next to a bronze statue of Barbara Johns.

“It was an honor to be up there,” said Baumer, as she reflected on the cultural impact of Johns, who was also 16 when she led a student strike in April 1951 to protest conditions at her segregated Farmville school.

Baumer was in town with her family to receive an award she won for an essay she wrote about Johns.

The Baumers were part of a crowd estimated by organizers to be 4,000 that descended Monday on the state Capitol and braved sweltering heat to witness the dedication of a memorial honoring some of the state’s civil rights pioneers.

The bronze and granite monument features 18 figures, including some of the 1951 student strikers from Farmville’s Robert Russa Moton High School.

Other panels on the four-sided monument depict civil rights attorneys Oliver W. Hill Sr. and Spottswood Robinson III; a religious leader who aided the students; and on the fourth side, an ethnically diverse crowd of people walking together into the future.

Hill and Robinson successfully took the students’ case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court – it was combined with four other cases – which in a 1954 ruling struck down school segregation.

Speaking at the ceremony, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said the monument breaks a barrier on the Capitol grounds where the other statues are an exclusive group of Virginia men from the past.

“It isn’t just about yesterday. It’s about today and tomorrow,” Kaine said.

The “new Virginia” recognizes contributions from women, children and minorities as embodied in the monument and has been forged from the “tragic but triumphant history of the commonwealth,” he said.

The governor was joined at the event by legislators and luminaries, including actor Blair Underwood, acclaimed poet Nikki Giovanni, and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond.

But the day seemed more like the celebration of a story that had been largely overlooked than the personalities on stage.

“I never thought I’d see this day,” said Joan Johns Cobb.

She uttered those words late Monday morning, minutes after inspecting the statue of her older sister Barbara Johns.

Then she paused, as if she were pondering the thought as it hung in the humid air.

“It’s beyond my wildest imagination,” continued Cobb, 70, of South Orange, N.J.

Dozens of members of the extended Johns family, and relatives of Hill, Robinson and L. Francis Griffin, a minister who helped the Moton students, were among the crowd that gathered on the lawns just west of the Governor’s Mansion to witness the day’s events.

Several students caught up in the state’s Massive Resistance policies against integration, an era that spanned from the late 1950s into the ’60s, also attended.

Not far from the site of the civil rights monument sits a bronze statue of former governor and U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr., a leader of the Massive Resistance movement.

During that period, some Virginia localities refused to fund schools rather than integrate them, forcing families to send their children out of state to be educated.

Other children who came of school age at that time simply went without an education.

In Norfolk, schools were closed in 1958 to prevent integration.

When city schools reopened in 1959, Andrew Heidelberg was one of a group of 17 black students who enrolled.

While his time at Norview High School was almost unbearable, Heidelberg said the civil rights memorial shows him there is continuing progress toward equality.

“Virginia is kind of stepping out, even though it’s 50 years later, to do such a distinguished feat for … all of the people who participated and were responsible for the breaking down of Massive Resistance,” he said.

Scholarships to fund the continuing education of students shut out of school during that era were established by the state legislature in 2004.

The next year, then-Gov. Mark Warner helped establish a commission to build a monument at the Capitol.

Warner’s wife, Lisa Collis, who worked with the commission and the foundation established to raise money for the memorial, said the idea was initially inspired when her youngest daughter asked why Capitol Square didn’t include statues of civil rights crusaders.

The $2.45 million memorial was funded with donations from about 400 groups, including a $50,000 contribution from the Landmark Foundation, a charitable arm of The Virginian-Pilot.

When the monument, sculpted by Stanley Bleifeld, was finally unveiled, the crowd of onlookers surged forward to get the first look.

“I just can’t describe it, still,” said Terry Harrison, Barbara Johns’ daughter, through a beaming smile. “I think it still hasn’t hit me.”

Harrison, of Toms River, N.J., said her mother, who died in 1991, would have been stunned by the memorial.

“She would say 'All this for a little girl from Farmville?’”

 Julian Walker, (804) 697-1564, julian.walker@pilotonline.com