ODU archivist starting a catalogue of integration

A year ago, Sonia Yaco got the call that archivists like her dream about:

We have boxes of old documents and don't know what to do with them. Would Old Dominion University like them?

The boxes contained original letters related to the desegregation of Norfolk public schools, yellowed newspaper clippings and onion-skin internal memos primarily covering the 1950s to 1980s.

It was a gold mine for Yaco, who had taken the job at ODU specifically to work with its collection on Massive Resistance, a period in Virginia history when the state fought the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that segregated public schools were illegal. She couldn't stop wondering after she got the material:

"Who else has cool stuff like this?"

After calling other college libraries, Yaco discovered there was no central database of Massive Resistance archives. She tapped a colleague to create DOVE, the Desegregation of Virginia Education project, which identifies and preserves records of the state's desegregation process.

This is prime time for DOVE, Yaco said, with the 50th anniversary of Massive Resistance, when several schools closed in September 1958 to prevent desegregation and reopened in 1959. She and a network of history professors, archivists and researchers from around the state are visiting historical societies and school board offices to see what they have.

DOVE is also appealing to churches and people who have old photos, scrapbooks, yearbooks, personal letters and diaries of that time. Project leaders want to know about everything, including material on the desegregation of colleges and busing for integration - e ven collections outside Virginia. DOVE doesn't necessarily want the items but wants to catalog where they are.

Yaco has come across people who hesitate to hold on to such a painful time in Virginia's history, but DOVE isn't about taking sides or making judgments, she said.

"There are parts of Virginia history that people are proud of - Colonial history, Civil War," Yaco said. "In talking to other historians, very little is collected on the 20th-century history.... We actually do OK in documenting segregation, but not desegregation."

Yaco has always liked to find solutions to problems. As a 15-year-old student activist in Ann Arbor, Mich., she and others became concerned about a lack of student rights and the way the school system funneled blacks into lower-level classes. She filed petitions to run for the school board, but was ineligible because she was not 18.

According to a 1972 newspaper article, Yaco garnered 1,240 write-in votes, "the most phenomenal support for a candidate not on the ballot in Ann Arbor history."

Her drive hasn't stopped.

"There are a lot of people who have joined us, but, without Sonia, this would not exist," said Bea Hardy, director of the Special Collections Research Center at the College of William and Mary.

Hardy was the first to join the DOVE network and chairs the Tidewater task force, one of several around the state responsible for tracking down materials.

DOVE is still organizing, but it is seeing results. Yaco recently received a banker's box of material from the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties, a segregationist group that formed in 1954 to fight integration. The widow of Michael Stolee, the man who designed Norfolk's controversial busing plan beginning in the 1960s, donated her husband's papers after Harvard and other groups did not want them, Yaco said.

"We're concerned that things are being thrown out and they are," Yaco said. "Some people are somewhere between apathy and shame, and in between there are some people who don't know it's important.

"We don't want this history to disappear."

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