by Sarah Becker Copyright ©2021 Sarah Becker Celebrating Women’s History Month “I am absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the people on the wrong side in our nation—the extreme rightists of our nation, have often used time more effectively than the people of good will,” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in 1967 in The Future of Integration . “And it may well be that this generation has to repent, not merely for the vitriolic words and violent action of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say ‘wait on time.’” After more than 110 years, Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s statue has been removed from the Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol. If Virginia’s Lost Cause advocates are riled others are quietly rejoicing. March is Women’s History Month and the Commonwealth has chosen to honor sixteen year-old, black student activist Barbara Rose Johns (1935-1991) instead. “It was time that Negroes were treated equally with whites, time that they had a decent school, time for students themselves to do something about it,” Johns explained. “There wasn’t any fear. I just thought—this is your moment. Seize it!” Barbara Johns 1951 “plan was daring, even risky: Convince the entire all-black student body to walk out of [Farmville, Virginia’s, Robert Russa Moton High School] and not return until the government gave them a bigger, better building—one like the white students had,” The New York Times noted in 2019. “The case Johns would join, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, would not only have the largest group of plaintiffs; it would also be the only one that was led by students.” The Davis case was one of five consolidated cases known as Brown…
Old Town Crier Written by ©2019 Sarah Becker Copyright ©2019 Sarah Becker 1957 Textbook-Fake News In 1950 the 81st Congress convened; government scientists worked on a hydrogen bomb and Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy condemned Communism. Soviet-armed North Korean troops invaded South Korea; the U.S. Supreme Court upheld black Americans right to attend a state law school, and segregated Virginia ranked thirty-fourth in its financial support of education. In Virginia education was mostly “neglected,” except for a 7th grade state-listed history book written to appeal to a “conservative rural audience.” “What is most distressing about the product of the 1950 Virginia Textbook Commission—and the Virginia General Assembly that created it—is not the over-glorifying of Virginia’s heritage, but a lack of confidence in it or her people,” The Virginian-Pilot wrote in 1965. “The concept of an arm of the government supervising the writing of history is precisely the sort of statism to which Virginia politicians object so vehemently in their own Federal Government.” President Donald J. Trump (R-NY) defines fake news as not true. “False stories created to be shared or distributed for the purpose of…promoting or discrediting a public figure or political movement.” Commission Chairman, former Virginia Delegate and a top-ranking member of the Byrd Organization Cecil W. Taylor, of Lynchburg, admitted the 7th grade textbook—Virginia: History, Government, Geography by Francis Butler Simkins—was “written with bias, glorification, and political cant.” In fact, the 7th grade history text was “‘purified’ by state censors” in an effort “to appeal to conservative Virginia’s point of view.” “Dixie [the South] is…
©2017 Sarah Becker The Sounds of Silence In 1966 Simon & Garfunkel had a number one song, President Lyndon B. Johnson created the U.S. Department of Transportation, and U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd, Sr. (D-VA) died at his Berryville home. The Byrd machine passed politically from father to son, Johnson appointed the first black U.S. Cabinet member, and U.S. Senator Willis Robertson (D-VA) lost Presidential favor. Virginia’s failure to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision, Byrd Sr.’s co-authorship of the Southern Manifesto left many Civil Rights issues unresolved. “We regard the decision of the Supreme Court in the [bundled] school cases as a clear abuse of judicial power,” the Manifesto said. “It climaxes a trend in the Federal Judiciary undertaking to legislate…to encroach upon the reserved rights of the States and the people.” Virginia massively resisted Brown. In Alexandria, in 1966, the subject was integration of the all-white Thomas Jefferson Middle School. If integrated, the re-fashioned school, located at Cameron and N. West Streets, “would draw from nearby census tracts designated as ‘poverty stricken.’” The Rosemont neighborhood protested and the building was torn down. “Alexandria quietly is making plans for a model community-centered facility to replace its least integrated elementary school, Charles Houston,” The Washington Post reported in January 1968. “But present indications are that the new Jefferson-Houston Elementary School [K-5] will be as segregated as the old one.” “The new building is now on the drawing boards and expected to open in 1969,” The Post continued. It could provide an opportunity for the city to redraw attendance boundaries and promote integration, if it chooses…[but]…Alexandria school authorities have no plans to cross the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad tracts that have been the traditional boundary between the city’s Negro district and white, middle-class neighborhoods [like…
In 1964 China’s Mao Tse-Tung published his Little Red Book, Cassius Clay [Muhammad Ali] won the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s $947,000,000 War on Poverty began. The North Vietnamese attacked two US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, three missing civil rights workers were found buried in a Mississippi earth dam, and the bipartisan Civil Rights Bill of 1964 was signed. “The civil rights bill is the law of the land today,” The Alexandria Gazette wrote on July 3, 1964, “and civil rights groups immediately began testing whether the sweeping provisions against discrimination can break generations of racial barriers.” The 10 Virginia members of the House of Representatives voted against the Civil Rights Act. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was President Johnson’s “challenge to all Americans to [voluntarily] transform the commands of our laws into the customs of our land.” In Virginia, despite ratification of the 24th Amendment, elements of the discriminatory 1902 election poll tax remained. With Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896—the US Supreme Court’s separate but equal doctrine—black newspaper editors like Alexandria’s Colored Republican Magnus L. Robinson denounced racial discrimination. Colored Republicans met “to devise means so the ‘Lily Whites’ of the South may not crowd [them] out…to petition [southern] negroes to unite [and] come back to first principles—human rights.” Plessy remained Jim Crow law until Brown v. Board of Education in1954. Until the mid-1930s enterprising Alexandria blacks traveled to the District of Columbia for high school: to attend either Armstrong or Dunbar High Schools. Samuel W. Tucker, born in 1913, bootlegged his Armstrong High School education. Yet a white only high school stood within sight of his Alexandria home. Samuel W. Tucker is a hero of both the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras. His father, real estate agent Samuel A. Tucker…