Showdown over Norfolk’s segregated schools changed lives forever

On a simmering summer afternoon, more than 60 people packed the basement of the administration building for an emergency meeting of the Norfolk School Board.

Francis Crenshaw, a lawyer, often served as spokesman for his fellow board members and did not shy away from the moment. Reading from a two-page statement, he laid out the dilemma in blunt terms:

“The Norfolk School System is in a precarious predicament. By federal court order, which will be obeyed, we may have to admit colored children to our white schools. If this comes to pass, those schools are closed by state law.”

But Norfolk school officials had their own plan. The board was about to unveil one last effort – a dubious and elaborate testing plan – to keep the schools as segregated as possible.

The School Board announcement that day – July 17, 1958 – was four years in the making. Federal and state forces had been heading for an inevitable collision since the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling.

In June 1958, a federal judge had ordered the board to finally obey the Supreme Court’s mandate: Norfolk could no longer deny Negro students admission to white schools. But Virginia had been digging in its heels, crafting ways to defy the ruling and creating laws to shut any school where the races mixed.

Members of the Norfolk chapter of the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties, a growing segregationist group, were in the audience for the emergency meeting. So were attorneys for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Negro parents wondering if their children would finally get a chance at better schools.

At her home in Norview, Marjorie Turner waited anxiously to hear the outcome. She had been following the news in the papers, and she wouldn’t put anything past the school leaders.

A month before, Turner had filled out applications for two of her children to go to Norview Junior High, the white school only a few blocks from their home. It made perfect sense: Why put her children on a bus to go across town when they could walk to school in 10 minutes?

While her mother awaited word from the emergency session, 13-year-old Patricia Turner was busy trying not to let the summer heat get the best of her; she could hardly care less about a bunch of stuffy adults in a boardroom across town.

Neither could Olivia Driver and Andrew Heidelberg. The three teenagers were busy skinning their knees, climbing trees and playing football in the city’s wooded edges. Before long, they would make history.

Three years earlier, a group of Negro parents had handed the board a petition with 233 names, demanding that it end segregation.

The board instead voted to continue separating students by race for another year, but the petition was a warning shot: The city’s Negro leadership was readying for battle.

Virginia’s NAACP was the largest in the South, more than 27,000 members strong, and the Norfolk chapter always welcomed a good fight. The decade before, a young NAACP attorney had come to town. Thurgood Marshall helped successfully sue the Norfolk School Board for equal pay for its Negro teachers.

Norfolk was one of the

fastest-growing cities in the country, and it had an emerging colored middle class. There was a new college, Virginia State College Norfolk Division , spreading in the Brambleton section. And Hampton Institute across the water produced a steady stream of professionals.

The Norfolk Journal and Guide was one of the most respected publications in the country, and could name among its readers former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Church Street was the avenue for Negro life, teeming with doctors, lawyers and businesses.

The worlds of Negroes and whites did not have to intersect often, which was fine with both sides. But public education was another matter. It was known that Negro schools received the outdated books and equipment discarded by white schools.

In 1956, a year after the parents’ petition, NAACP attorney Victor J. Ashe filed a lawsuit to stop segregation. Within two days, the School Board sent a letter to the governor asking for direction.

At the time, Virginia really belonged to U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr., a staunch segregationist whose reach extended deeply into Norfolk’s boardrooms. Byrd spat at the Supreme Court’s decision, arguing it trampled on states’ rights. The forces of integration, he’d later proclaim, were “working on the theory that if Virginia can be brought to her knees, they can march through the rest of the South singing, 'Hallelujah!’”

He’d vowed time and again that Virginia would lead the fight: “If we can organize the Southern states for massive resistance to this order, I think that in time the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South.”

The movement to fight integration now had a name: Massive Resistance.

Three months after Ashe’s lawsuit, the governor called a special session of the General Assembly. It passed several laws, including rules to thwart the NAACP and to fund only “efficient schools” – meaning ones that were segregated.

Virginia became a role model; five other Southern states soon followed suit.

By February 1957, Walter E. Hoffman, a no-nonsense federal judge, had an answer to the Ashe lawsuit: He ordered Norfolk to desegregate by the fall. School leaders appealed the ruling, successfully holding off any action for another year, but by 1958 they could stall no longer.

Marjorie Turner read the newspaper reports with a grin. She thought Byrd’s actions – and the governor’s and now her city’s – were ridiculous. As a Navy wife, she had lived in the integrated North for a few years before returning to Norfolk.

Turner had grown up in Huntersville , and she knew her hometown’s roots were still Southern. She knew it was stupid that her children could play with whites at the beach at the integrated Navy base but could not sit with them in a class.

Even her daughter, Patricia, who got nervous easily, didn’t see color as she walked among the people at the base. Pat, a tomboy, didn’t pay much attention to grown folks as long as they let her climb trees and read books.

Andrew Heidelberg’s world was much more closed than Pat’s. In the summer of ’58, his family lived in the new cinderblock housing for Negroes in Norview. He was a smart kid – some said too smart for his own good at times – and his few experiences with whites were unpleasant, so he was happy to stay clear of them.

An incident a few years earlier still haunted him. One morning, Andy, his mom and his brothers boarded a bus to downtown. At Lafayette Boulevard and Tidewater Drive, two white girls got on, and the driver told Andy’s family to get up and let the girls sit. It was the custom, so they moved. Andy said nothing, but inside he was fuming: He hated that his mother had to bow to children.

Olivia Driver would sometimes board the bus near Pat’s and Andy’s houses and sit in the front rows. She’d stare at the driver, daring him to tell her to move. He never did. Quiet but feisty, Olivia was an old soul. She revered her grandmother, Margaret Welch, whom she lived with in the Oakwood section of Norview.

When Olivia walked the streets, she did as her grandmother told her and looked everybody in the eye – even when the Southern way was for Negroes to avert their eyes from a white man’s stare. Her grandmother told her that she had nothing to fear because God was on her side and right would always triumph.

In May of ’58, lawyers for the Negro children kept pressing. They returned to court, asking Hoffman to make his desegregation order effective for the fall school term. In June, Hoffman granted the request, ordering the School Board to act promptly.

On June 10, the first Negro applicants showed up at the superintendent’s office to fill out paperwork. By the July 17 board meeting, 137 Negro children had applied to white schools that were closer to their homes; while white children normally went to ones in their neighborhoods, many Negro students traveled miles on city buses for classes.

At the meeting, board members handed out guidelines for a new evaluation program. It would apply only to students transferring from a previously all-Negro school to a white school, or vice versa. Since no whites were asking to attend a Negro school, everyone in the audience knew it applied only to the Negro children.

The board listed 10 criteria that administrators had to consider when considering the applications. Among them:

- The assignment shall not endanger the health or safety of the child or the children already enrolled in the school.

- The assignment shall not interfere with the proper instruction of pupils already enrolled in the school.

- The assignment shall consider the physical and moral fitness of the applicant and their relation to the general health and welfare of the pupils already enrolled in the school.

- The assignment shall take into consideration the expected emotional and social adjustment of the pupil to the school to which he is assigned.

In addition, the children were to take a series of exams – the board didn’t say what kind – and the superintendent would appoint committees to interview the students and their parents or guardians. The board would review the test results, school records and interview transcripts, then vote on each child.

The process would begin in less than two weeks.

When Marjorie Turner found out about the process, she wasn’t happy. Her oldest two kids were reading and writing before they started school; she knew they’d pass the tests. But the idea of screening – of weeding out the unwanted – disturbed her.

Still, Turner told Pat and her 11 -year-old brother, James, the last thing they wanted to hear on a sweltering July day: Babies, we’re going downtown to take some tests.

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

TOMORROW: Jumping through hoops – Young Negro students applying to attend the white schools in Norfolk face interviews.