Former segregationist learns respect for the rule of law

It was all so inane, Hal Bonney Jr. says now of the ploys that state and local leaders took in 1958 to keep schools segregated – and of his own views.

Bonney was a Norview High School history teacher then and became one of the most recognizable opponents of integration after he appeared in the nationally televised documentary, “The Lost Class of ’59.”

In 1959, he ran for the House of Delegates on a segregationist ticket, and later became a superintendent of a private academy established for white families trying to avoid integrated schools. He eventually left education to study law.

Today Bonney is a retired bankruptcy judge and remorseful for what he said and believed then.

“When you look back at how stupid it all was, even the term, 'Massive Resistance.’ What in the hell is 'massive resistance?’ ” Bonney said recently from his Norfolk home.

“I should’ve realized and others should have realized that the Supreme Court had spoken and that the law of the land is the law of the land.”

It was during a constitutional law class he took in the late 1960s, Bonney said, that he gained a greater respect for the court’s ruling and softened his views on integration. But, while teaching, he shared the opinion of many whites that desegregation would not work.

It was known, he said, that the black schools were not up to par and there was a concern that mixing the students would hold white children back. In addition, many whites simply were not ready to change years of entrenched thinking – that blacks were not equal.

While in law school, Bonney taught college courses in the evenings, some with black students, and as Norfolk schools integrated, his concerns about a dilution of quality, “just didn’t hold water.” He was appointed to the bench in 1971 and retired in 1996, at age 65 .

Bonney is active in his church and community groups, including serving on the board for the Union Mission Ministries and doing consulting with the motion picture industry, scratching a love of movies that goes back to Saturdays spent in the Newport Theater in Park Place.

He often thinks of those tumultuous days of the 1950s and ’60s, and Norview, where he taught one of the black students who eventually desegregated the school.

“My error is that I believed too far, I took it too far, I said too much,” Bonney said. “That’s a matter of character and that’s on the scales with God. I think, in time, He will deal with that if I did not in a proper fashion practice and live his will.”

Denise Watson Batts, (757) 446-2504, denise.batts@pilotonline.com