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Virginia Heroes of School Desegregation

University of Virginia Press

Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks are widely celebrated in this country, but there were many others who fought, heroically, for civil rights. Among them were Virginia lawyers who played key roles in desegregating America’s schools.  At Virginia Commonwealth University, a professor of history has written about them in a new book called Keep On Keepin’ On.  Sandy Hausman spoke with him and filed this report.

In 1954, the Supreme ruled against the concept of separate but equal schools – ordering public systems to stop segregating students.  One of five defendants in the case was Virginia’s Prince Edward County, according to Virginia Commonwealth Professor Brian Daugherity. 

“The Supreme Court ruled segregation unconstitutional but did not provide a timeline whereby desegregation should take place,” he says.

So Virginia dragged its feet. Fifteen years passed and the Supreme Court was forced to rule again – this time against the public school system in New Kent County, Virginia.

“In fact they demonstrated that county officials were using school buses to maintain segregation by busing black children past the white school on the way to the black school and the opposite for black children,” Daugherity explains.

When the justices ordered an end to that practice, Prince Edward closed its public schools – following the examples of Warren County, Norfolk and Charlottesville, which shut down between 1956 and 1959 rather than desegregate.  White students attended church or private schools, but many black kids were left with no place to go.

“Some of them went to school in neighboring counties," Daugherity says. " Some of them obtained assistance to go to school out of state, but over 1,500 students went without an education for five years, while the schools were closed in Prince Edward County.”

During that time, black lawyers in Virginia continued the fight.

“There is an African-American attorney that worked for the NAACP that is not well known in Virginia that I think deserves to be recognized," says Daugherity.  "His name was Samuel Wilbert Tucker.  He went by S.W. Tucker. He was a civil rights attorney whose work dates back to the 1930’s and continued all the way through the 1970’s."

Tucker put his life on the line – moving his family to Emporia in the heart of southside.

“It was one of the more racially intransigent parts of the state.  Tucker built a trap door in his home, because he knew that he might be facing some of the dangers that African-American civil rights workers faced in the deep south." he says. "We saw homes bombed.  We saw crosses burned.  We saw death threats.  We saw economic retribution – loss of jobs and so on.”

And the federal judge who moved south to Richmond to enforce desegregation also faced angry public reaction.  His name was Robert Mehrige.

“For his actions Judge Mehrige was vilified, and although he was a federal judge doing his job he received countless threats in the mail.  His dog was shot.  Someone started a fire on his property.  He was forced to have federal marshalls trailing him for nearly two years – he and his family," Daugherity says.

To his credit, Mehrige did not complain, noting that he had federal protection at the time while black attorneys like S.W. Tucker, did not.

And that is a central theme of Daugherity’s book – Keep on Keepin’ On – advice offered to blacks in Virginia by NAACP lawyer W. Lester Banks.  The author says Banks, Tucker and their colleagues have not gotten the credit they deserve for making desegregation happen nationwide.