Massive Resistance exhibit stirs those who lived through era

NORFOLK

Members of the “Norfolk 17” and the “Lost Class of 1959” today toured a museum display about an episode in their lives that still haunts them.

“It’s tearful. It’s really tearful,” said Mary Jane Harnly Birdsong of Suffolk, who stood in a gallery at the Chrysler Museum of Art. The exhibition she visited as part of a media event is called “50 Years Later: The Lessons of Massive Resistance.”

The show, which will be up through March 1, gives a chronology of events that led to the closing in Norfolk of six all-white junior high and high schools from fall 1958 until Feb. 2, 1959, to avoid school desegregation. News clippings, photos and school annuals and other items flesh out the story.

That school year 50 years ago was disrupted for about 10,000 white students. Birdsong was part of the “lost class,” which consisted of about 1,300 seniors, only half of which returned to their high school after schools reopened, she said.

Pat Turner of Norfolk, one of the 17 black students who first integrated Norfolk schools, was feeling emotional, too, as she milled through a room evoking painful memories from her youth.

She joined a group of women from the “lost class” discussing a school annual opened to a page where someone long ago had crossed out the pictures of two black students. The white women were bothered by this, and debated whether the album should be turned to another page.

“This needs to be shown,” Turner stressed. “So much has been hidden. And to see all of us together shows how far we’ve come.”

As faces reddened with feeling, Turner said to the group, “Ok, give me a hug!” A cluster of women smiled and hugged and wiped their eyes.

The exhibition is part of a citywide commemoration of the end of what was dubbed Massive Resistance.

Bill Hennessey, the museum’s director and organizer of the show, observed the women’s interaction. “The point of this whole commemoration is to get people talking,” he said, “positively and respectfully.”

The show also features two men who played pivotal roles in the reopening of the schools. One was Walter Hoffman, the federal judge who declared massive resistance unconstitutional; the other was Lenoir Chambers, The Virginian-Pilot editor who won a Pulitzer Prize for his writings that condemned the school closings.

Both men’s children were at the museum today.

Elizabeth Burgess of Norfolk, Lenoir Chambers’ daughter, stood in one corner of the gallery chatting with Andrew Heidelberg of Hampton, one of the 17 and the first to integrate sports, he told her.

Burgess held up his book, a history of the Norfolk 17, and said to him, “There should be 17 different stories just like this.”

Because he played football at Norview, Heidelberg told her, “I saw two sides of white people.” He had certainly felt the sting of racism.

“But I saw the best year of my life, to this day, because I was a football star. And they loved me.”

 Teresa Annas, (757) 446-2485, teresa.annas@pilotonline.com