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Hoffman-Boston

Poetry by Earlene Green Evans

Published: February 10, 2021

Earlene Green Evans grew up and attended public schools in Arlington, Virginia, graduating from Hoffman-Boston High School. She received a B.S. degree from Saint Paul’s College in Lawrenceville, Virginia, and an M.S. degree in Library Media from Virginia State University. She worked as a middle and high school librarian until she retired.

Earlene authored a children’s book, "I Love You, Ugly Old Hag," and co-authored three educational books. They are "A Step Beyond: Multimedia Activities For Learning American History"; "Hidden Skeletons and Other Funny Stories," and "3-D Displays For Libraries, Schools, and Media Centers."

Earlene Green and Godfrey Moore 2

Earlene Green Evans and Godfrey Moore, date unknown

Earlene is a member of Pi Lambda Theta International Honor Society, Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Northwoods Civic Association, Virginia State Alumni Association, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., and several committees at her church. In addition to writing, Earlene enjoys reading, sewing, and playing the flute. She lives in Henrico County, Virginia with her husband, Alga. They have two adult children and a grandson.

First AKA Cotillion 1958

First AKA Cotillion 1958. Image Caption says "Sponsored by Zeta Chi Omega (Arl. VA) First Cotillion, 1958. Earlene Far Right. Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority.

Earlene Green Evans started writing the poems about four years ago, and continued to add others to the collection as time went by.  Her latest poem was written in 2019, and she still gets ideas for other poems to this day. Ms. Green writes with wit and charm about what it was like growing up during the fifties in Johnson’s Hill (now Arlington View), a predominantly African American neighborhood at that time.  

She describes the general feeling of cooperation and respect among neighbors and the good manners expected from every child; reflects on the influence that radio and television had on families, describes what school was like, popular fashion trends, what was important in the news both locally and nationally as well as what young people did for fun.

In the following poems from her upcoming poetry book, learn what it was like to go to Hoffman-Boston during "School Desegregation", what it was like to attend a high school “House Party,” and having the first “Neighborhood Television" set.

School Desegragation

EarleneEvansSchoolDesegregation

The eyes of the world are on D.C.,
This side of the ocean, land of the free.
Home of the United States Supreme Court,
Where monumental decisions are not a sport.

Will black and white kids attend the same schools?
Or will they live by the laws of fools?
Black lawyers work to present their case . . .
Of segregation, a national disgrace.

Separate, but equal cannot proceed,
Equality, regardless of race or creed.
Spottswood Robinson, Thurgood Marshall and Harold Boulware,
Aim to reverse racial laws, declaring them unfair.

They are key lawyers to Brown versus the Board,
This terrible situation will not be ignored!
A decision is made by the nine in black,
That segregationists are on the wrong track.

Now, every black child in any public school,
Will benefit from this constitutional rule.
Thanks to the judges of the highest court,
Thanks to the lawyers who challenged and Fought.

House Party

EarleneEvansHouseParty (1)

There’s a teen house party on Friday night.
We move to music under a blue light.
Mary’s basement is a cozy place,
The room downstairs has limited space.

Will that stop us from “cutting a rug?”
Not as long as the cord stays in the plug.
We bump each other, but we don’t mind,
During the “Mashed Potatoes,” and the forbidden “Grind.”

The “Uptown,” and the “Bird Land” are favorites too,
Performed by members of a Rock and Roll crew.
A scratched record makes an ugly repeat,
Moving the head forward makes the song complete.

Refreshments are provided by Pam and Jade,
We have homemade cookers and lime Kool-Aid.
Everyone stops for a kissing game,
“Spin the Bottle” and hope for your “flame.”

Dancing continues, fast and slow,
Cheers to the couple who “takes the floor.”
The party is fun until Mary’s parents appear,
And remind us that the end is near.

On the last record, we do a slow-moving dance,
And steal a little kiss, taking a chance.
Then tell Mary, our house party host,
We enjoyed the evening to the utmost!

Neighborhood Television

EarleneEvansNeighborhoodTelevision

The Greens bought a television set.
It cost so much, they are deep in debt.
A wooden box, with a small round screen.
Showed pictures like a movie machine.

No other family in our neighborhood,
Can see stars in Hollywood.
We received the Greens’ invitation,
To join a viewing celebration.

We gladly accepted and rushed next door.
Neighbors were sitting all over the floor.
The large crowd squeezed one another,
Lacking air, we thought we would smother.

Bodies were twisted, and turned just right,
To behold a show in black and white.
Eyes bulged and mouths dropped wide.
To see what a TV would provide.

The Lone Ranger chased a mean outlaw.
We joined the action with a big, “Hurrah!”
He took out his lasso, aimed it, and threw,
As zigzag lines interrupted our view.

Mr. Green turned knobs from left to right,
The lines on the screen were an awful sight.
We were calm and patient; we had to wait.
After a minute, the picture was straight.

The lasso missed as the picture started to roll,
This interruption was harder to control.
Frustrated, Mr. Green turned different knobs.
We shifted, squirmed, and suppressed our sobs.

When the rolling stopped, we read on the screen,
Words that could spark a mad mob scene.
The message was clear, it made us shriek . . .
“Tune in to The Lone Ranger again next week!”

February 10, 2021 by Web Editor Filed Under: App, Center for Local History, News Tagged With: Hoffman-Boston

George Melvin Richardson: Taking a Stand

Published: January 28, 2021

Graphic image of a megaphone

Join us for a new series of stories from the Center for Local History highlighting members of our community who made a difference in ways that helped shape our history and created positive change. 

Their voices were not always loud, but what they said or did had a significant impact on our community.

George Melvin Richardson

George Melvin Richardson (1913-2015) was an African-American educator, school principal, WW II U.S. Army officer, and civic leader. Born in Oklahoma, Richardson graduated from Langston University, Oklahoma’s only historically Black college, and then attended Columbia University in New York where he obtained a master’s degree.

George Richardson, Secondary School Administrator Arlington, VA

A subsequent series of positions in education and public schools in Oklahoma helped lay the groundwork for what was to become a lifetime of educating and mentoring students in his community. After being drafted during WW II, Richardson was stationed in Italy, where he was an Army lieutenant and captain.

Upon returning to the U.S., Richardson and his wife moved to Arlington County where he served as principal of the all-Black Hoffman-Boston High School from 1951 until its closure in 1964. Noticing that Hoffman-Boston lacked many of the facilities and resources of other Arlington County schools, Richardson worked tirelessly to improve and expand the school. In an oral history conducted by staff of the Center for Local History, Richardson said that Hoffman-Boston “wasn’t equipped as well as other schools. Our science department wasn’t equipped as well...We didn’t have an auditorium – the building was not adequate.” His air of quiet authority and steely determination deeply impacted both colleagues and students.

“Hoffman-Boston School,” Richardson said, “There’s a golf course there. The kids will leave their lunch period and won’t come back…They’d go there (and caddy) and get little sandwiches and so forth… I said “You’re here for school. And you’re here for this number of hours.”… I went to the golf course and I told them that I didn’t want them to employ these kids…they belong in school and not at a golf course. So they stopped that.”

George Richardson talking with several younger Hoffman-Boston students.

George Richardson talking with several younger Hoffman-Boston students.

Richardson was also a pivotal figure in helping to create the Arlington View Neighborhood Conservation Plan (one of the first in the county) and was a member of the executive board of the Arlington Committee of 100. After Hoffman-Boston closed in 1964, Richardson became an assistant principal at Wakefield H.S. and served as an educator in Montgomery County, MD. before retiring to Oklahoma.

Richardson received the Charles P. Monroe Civil Rights Award from the Arlington branch of the NAACP, was inducted into the Wakefield High School Hall of Fame, and received the Outstanding Community Service Award from the Greater Washington Urban League.

Assistant Principal, Counselor, Mr Richardson

George Richardson, right, with the Assistant Principal and councilor at Hoffman-Boston, seated at a table.

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January 28, 2021 by Web Editor Filed Under: App, Center for Local History, News, Taking a Stand / Speaking Out Tagged With: Hoffman-Boston

Oral History: Attending Hoffman-Boston High School in the 1940s

Published: September 3, 2020

Interview with Delores C. Downing

Many Arlington students are now returning to school, albeit in a very different manner than back-to-schools in the past. In this oral history interview, Delores Downing describes attending Hoffman-Boston in the 1940s.

Arlington Voices the Oral History Collection

Oral histories are used to understand historical events, actors, and movements from the point of view of real people’s personal experiences.

Downing attended Hoffman-Boston from the beginning of her schooling at age five to her graduation at 16, when she was the youngest of a four-person graduating class. In the interview, Downing talks about her time in school, businesses in her neighborhood, the construction of the Pentagon, and what it was like growing up in Arlington.

Downing’s parents also attended Hoffman-Boston, the first junior, and later senior high school, for African-American students in Arlington. Built in 1915, Hoffman-Boston replaced the Jefferson School, Arlington’s first school for African-American children, which opened in 1870.

Hoffman-Boston was named after Edward C. Hoffman, former principal of the Jefferson, and Ella M. Boston, former principal of Kemper, another school for African-American children in Arlington. Hoffman-Boston remained open until its final graduating class in 1964 when Arlington desegregated its school system.

Hoffman 1950

Hoffman-Boston High School, circa 1950s. Part of the George Melvin Richardson Collection.

Narrator: Delores C. Downing
Interviewer 1: Sara Collins
Interviewer 2: Joan White
Date: May 28, 2003
Note: There may be some discrepancies between the audio and written transcripts due to edits and additional details provided by the narrator after recording.

https://library.arlingtonva.us/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Downing_Delores_C_20030528-Oral-History.mp3
Science Demo

Science demonstration involving a fan at Hoffman-Boston, circa 1950s. Part of the George Melvin Richardson Collection.

Sara Collins: Tell us about the school. What did it look like when you entered the front door?

Delores C. Downing: Open lobby, always clean. To the left and right were the classrooms. If you walked straight ahead there was the auditorium (which is more or less in the same area in the present time). The elementary area was downstairs, junior/senior high upstairs if I remember correctly. Very small school, but a very good school. I do have a picture, maybe I’ll send a copy to you one day.

Children from Green Valley (Nauck) and Halls Hill (High View) area were bussed to HB, due to segregation. We worked from used books passed down from the white schools, but our teachers being who they were worked extremely hard and made good use of books and all supplies and equipment that we did (did not) receive to the best of their knowledge to give us the best education we had. We have P.E. in the back of the auditorium (there was no gym). But so much togetherness in whatever we had to do. During my school years, there were three graduations; from 6th grade to 7th, 9th to 10th, and finally completion of the 12th grade.

SC: I think that would be very helpful.

Joan White: Since you spent all of your school days at Hoffman-Boston, can you tell me during your time there, did the school configuration change? When you were in the first grade, was it like two rooms, and as time progressed did it become larger, or did they have to make it change because of the number of students attending?

DD: When I attended you had specific rooms for each grade.

Letterman Jacket

Group of Hoffman-Boston students stand talking. Student with his back to the camera wears a Hoffman-Boston letterman sweater. Circa 1950s. Part of the George Melvin Richardson Collection.

JW: So there were a number of rooms on the first floor to accommodate all of the elementary grades. Were those large rooms?

DD: They weren’t huge but they were comfortable rooms.

JW: Approximately how many students were in each room? I’m just curious as to how you all were in there.

DD: I don’t know but we were quite comfortable. We weren’t overcrowded. But I can’t give you dimensions on the size of the room. But then we used to have cloakrooms to hang our coats in. I’ll never forget, we had to memorize “The Night Before Christmas,” I think it was Ms. Burke’s class. On the cloakroom door, she pasted all the pages and from time-to-time, you would not stand in the same place, you would have to memorize that page. So even now I still know “The Night Before Christmas,” basically.

Elementary School Today

Hoffman-Boston Elementary School today. HB reopened an elementary school in 2000 in the Oakridge neighborhood of Arlington. Image courtesy of Arlington Public Schools.

This interview is part of the Center for Local History’s oral history collection, VA 975.5295 A7243oh ser.3 no. 183. Watch "Memories of Hoffman-Boston" to learn more about the Hoffman-Boston School.

The goal of the Arlington Voices project is to showcase the Center for Local History’s oral history collection in a publicly accessible and shareable way.

The Arlington Public Library began collecting oral histories of long-time residents in the 1970s, and since then the scope of the collection has expanded to capture the diverse voices of Arlington’s community. In 2016, staff members and volunteers recorded many additional hours of interviews, building the collection to 575 catalogued oral histories.

To browse our list of narrators indexed by interview subject, check out our community archive. To read a full transcript of an interview, visit the Center for Local History located at Central Library.

September 3, 2020 by Web Editor Filed Under: Center for Local History, News, Oral History Tagged With: Hoffman-Boston

The Early History of Arlington’s Parks and Recreation Department

Published: December 4, 2019

Starting with a $500 allocation in 1933, Arlington has grown over the past 75 years from one public park on Four Mile Run in 1941 to a Countywide system of parks, playgrounds, and programs.

In 1933, the Arlington County Board earmarked $500 for parks and playgrounds – amenities that at the time were still rare in the county. The initial funding of $500 was reduced from a proposed $2,500, but it allowed for the acquisition of land and maintenance of parcels that had been donated by developers.

This was the beginning of the County's first parks and recreation department, formally established in 1944 as the Department of Parks and Playgrounds.

First Public Park

Starting in 1936, the Arlington County School Board was given oversight of all recreational programs. That year also marked another major milestone - the acquisition of the County’s first public park. Located in the Four Mile Run-Lubber Run area, the park spanned 54 acres, and maintenance and development of the park were completed by members of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a work relief program established as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

In 1941, the Lubber Run Park formally opened to the public. Opening day was planned as a grand celebration, with a ceremony attended by State and County officials, and a massing of the colors performed by the Fort Myer Color Guard. But the festivities were rained out in a torrential downpour, and the park’s ceremonial start instead began simply, with its use by members of the County.

Parks and Rec

News story from the Northern Virginia Sun, February 13, 1936

In 1948 the County Board shifted the responsibility of County parks to the County Manager.

Recreation Centers

In 1951, Arlington County purchased the Henderson House at 4811 Third Street North to establish its first recreation center, later called the Arlington Recreation Center. The Center burned down in 1954, and in 1956 it was replaced with the Lubber Run Community Center, which remained open until 2018.

Henderson House

Henderson House, circa 1950.

Henderson Barn Fire

Henderson House barn after the fire, 1954.

Growth and Innovation

The Department of Recreation and Parks (as it was known starting in 1953) continued to grow, as did its innovations and additions.

In 1954, the department established the Silver Age Club No. 1, Virginia's first public recreation program designed for senior citizens. In 1960, Arlington's first therapeutic recreation playground was established for children with special needs. And by 1971, the County's parks included lighted outdoor sports facilities, an amphitheater in Lubber Run Park, and the establishment of nature trails.

Lubber Run Park
Lubber Run Ampitheater

Lubber Run Park Entrance Sign and Lubber Run Park Amphitheater, respectively. Photos courtesy of Arlington, VA Parks and Recreation.

Negro Recreation Section

Until 1962, the Arlington parks system was segregated. The Negro Recreation Section was designated by the parks department for African-American members of the community who were denied access to County parks. Created in 1948, the Negro Recreation Section provided sports and arts-related programming and held public events, which were often held at the Langston Recreation Center or Hoffman-Boston School. Ernest E. Johnson served as its supervisor from 1948-1962.

Parks and Recreation Today

In 2012, the parks system became formally known as the Department of Parks and Recreation, as it is referred to today. Currently, about 11 percent of Arlington’s land is reserved for parks, amounting to thousands of acres across the county.

Learn more and Arlington’s Department of Parks and Recreation through an interactive timeline of the department’s history.

Learn more about the history of the Negro Recreation Section in the Center for Local History’s Community Archives.

To learn more about Arlington's history, visit the Center for Local History on the first floor of the Central Library.

Do you have a question about this story, or a personal experience to share? 

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December 4, 2019 by Web Editor Filed Under: App, Center for Local History, Throwback Thursday Tagged With: Hoffman-Boston

The Jefferson School

Published: September 5, 2019

Have you driven or walked past the Army Navy Country Club in South Arlington?  The Jefferson School opened on that same ground in 1870, to educate African-American students.

Jefferson School 1

 Jefferson School Main Building, 1932

The school was named after the "Jefferson district," where it was located. Arlington, then part of Alexandria County, was split into three districts: Jefferson, Arlington, and Washington. The Jefferson School was the first African-American school in the Jefferson district, and one of two schools for African Americans in Alexandria County.

Attendance could be spotty when the school began due to many families needing older children to help with planting and harvesting; in 1872, the school had just ten students. With the help from a local trustee, the Jefferson school got a new building and attendance began to rise. In 1889, the school trustees purchased a new property on Johnson's Hill (at the far eastern end of Columbia Pike). By 1895, attendance had swelled to over 120 students, necessitating the addition of a second story to the building on Johnson Hill, and a second teacher.

photo of the Jefferson School, date unknown

Jefferson School Annex, date unknown.

On June 29, 1912, residents of the Jefferson District petitioned the school board to construct a new school building to replace the two-room school house on Johnson’s Hill. The Board agreed to the petition and purchased a three-acre property from the South Arlington Cemetery Corporation in 1914. One year later, the 4-room school house opened, serving African American students from first to ninth grade.

[History timeline note: Alexandria County was renamed Arlington County in 1920]

By 1930, enrollment exceeded the school’s capacity and Arlington County officials started planning an addition. The addition, which was completed in 1931, doubled the size of the school. One year later, Superintendent Fletcher Kemp renamed the Jefferson School as Hoffman-Boston Junior Colored High School, after Edward C. Hoffman, former principal of the Jefferson School, and Ella M. Boston, former principal of Kemper (another African-American school in Arlington).

Hoffman-Boston became the first African American high school in the county; the first senior class graduated in 1942.

Edward Hoffman

Edward Hoffman, 1866-1926. 

Possibly born at Freedman's Village, and raised in Arlington County, Edward Hoffman attended Howard University, enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1887, and was Principal of Jefferson School by 1896 until 1926.

Hoffman-Boston High School closed in 1964 as Arlington County integrated its schools. Today the building houses Hoffman-Boston Elementary School, located on South Queen Street.

Sources

"A Guide to the African American Heritage of Arlington County, Virginia," pages 49-51, produced by the Arlington County Historic Preservation Program in 2016, available in print at the Library.

"A Guide to the African American Heritage of Arlington County, Virginia," is also available as a downloadable PDF.

To learn more about Arlington's history, visit the Center for Local History on the first floor of the Central Library.

Do you have a question about this story, or a personal experience to share? 

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September 5, 2019 by Web Editor Filed Under: App, Center for Local History, Throwback Thursday Tagged With: Hoffman-Boston

“If You Don’t Vote, You Don’t Count”

Published: August 15, 2019

Can you imagine having to pay a tax for the three previous years before you could cast your vote in an election? Or registering to vote for a federal election, and then discovering that doing so had not registered you to vote in a local election?

Poll taxes and dual registrations are two systems that were used in Virginia between 1876 and 1966 in order to restrict who had access to voting.

1951 Flyer reminding voters to pay their 1951 Pol Tax

1951 flyer telling Arlington residents how to pay their poll tax in order to vote in the upcoming election

In 1876, after the Fifteenth Amendment granted African-Americans the right to vote, Virginia passed a poll tax to restrict African-American men from voting. Although this law was repealed in 1882, in 1901 the Virginia General Assembly called for a new constitution with the explicit purpose to secure the right of suffrage of the state's white men, and to take away the right to vote from anyone in the state who wasn't white.
(Read the Report of the proceedings and debates of the Constitutional Convention, state of Virginia : held in the city of Richmond June 12, 1901, to June 26, 1902)

The new constitution, which passed in 1902, reinstated the poll tax. This required voters to pay a tax of $1.50 six months prior to an election for each of the three years preceding an election. This disenfranchised approximately 90% of the black men and, counter to the intentions of those who had drafted the new constitution, nearly 50% of the white men who had previously been registered to vote in Virginia. The 1902 constitution also created an administrative structure that was difficult for any average citizen to navigate, further disenfranchising many poor men.

(American history timeline note: the 19th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1920, prohibiting the states and the federal government from denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex.)

While the 24th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (ratified in 1964) outlawed poll taxes in federal elections, it did not prevent states like Virginia from continuing to require poll taxes for state and local elections. At the time five states—Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia—retained poll taxes.

Virginia maintained poll taxes for state and local elections until 1966 when the Supreme Court ruled in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections that poll taxes were unconstitutional. Four years later, the Virginia Constitution of 1971 explicitly forbid the Virginia General Assembly from requiring poll taxes as a prerequisite to voting.

Between 1964 and 1966, when Virginians were required to pay poll taxes to vote in state and local elections but not in federal elections, Virginia instituted the dual registration system. Put in place when ratification of the 24th Amendment was all but certain, the dual registration system automatically extended federal registration to those who registered for state and local elections, but it did not automatically extend state and local registration to those who registered for federal elections. Since registering to vote and paying the poll tax were separate actions, this system disproportionately hurt those who only registered for federal elections.

These flyers were created in the 1950s by the local NAACP, and the Hoffman-Boston and Langston PTAs. They were designed to encourage Arlington's African-American residents to pay their poll taxes in order to vote in upcoming elections, frequently using a variation of the phrase, "If you don't vote in Arlington, you don't count in Arlington."

1954 Poll Tax Flyer from NAACP and Hoffman Boston PTA

1954 flyer on how to pay your poll tax in order to vote in upcoming School Board, County and State elections, created by the NAACP and Hoffman Boston and Langston PTAs. View item information on ProjectDAPS.

1958 flyer on the 10 points to learn in order to become a qualified voter

1958 flyer on the 10 points to learn in order to become a qualified voter. View item information in ProjectDAPS.

1950s NAACP Virginia Poll Tax Flyer, page 1
1956 NAACP Virginia Poll Tax Flyer

Poll Tax Month: a 1956 Virginia Poll Tax Flyer created by the NAACP, explaining what the poll tax was and how it related to being able to vote in both local and federal elections. View item information in ProjectDAPS.

Portia Haskins of Arlington filed suit against the Virginia Board of Elections and the Arlington County general registrar after she was required to re-register to vote in the November 1965 election despite paying her poll taxes in February and registering for federal elections the previous year.

On April 1, 1966, in Portia A. Haskins v. Levin Nock Davis et al. a Federal District Court ruled in favor of Haskins arguing that “[t]he provisions of Virginia’s dual voter registration…which treat persons who are registered only for federal elections differently from persons registered for all elections violate the equal protection laws of the 14th Amendment.”

To see more items relating to the poll tax, visit the Center for Local History's ProjectDAPS website, or visit the Center for Local History on the first floor of the Central Library.

Do you have a question about this story, or a personal experience to share? 

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August 15, 2019 by Web Editor Filed Under: Center for Local History, Throwback Thursday Tagged With: Hoffman-Boston

The Story of Arlington Public School Desegregation

Published: January 11, 2018

Each January, the world remembers Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Best known for his efforts to eradicate racism and segregation, and for his philosophy of nonviolence, Dr. King's leadership of the Montgomery bus boycott led to "court cases around the nation that challenged and overturned the constitutionality of Jim Crow laws."

One of those places was Arlington - the first county in Virginia to desegregate public schools. This story is documented in Project DAPS, a database of archival materials related to the legal and moral battles that culminated on February 2, 1959. The Project DAPS database is culled from the Center for Local History's Community Archives and includes thousands of photos, documents, and recordings.

The following article was written by Center for Local History researchers and relies on many primary source documents held in the Project DAPS collection. A note to readers on some of the language used in the Project DAPS database and this article.

 


 

The Story of Segregation and Desegregation in Arlington

At 8:45 a.m. on February 2, 1959, four young students from the nearby Hall’s Hill neighborhood entered Stratford Junior High School in Arlington, Virginia.

black and white photograph of 4 black students entering Stratford Junior High in 1959

Ronald Deskins, Michael Jones, Lance Newman, and Gloria Thompson walked into Stratford Junior High School on February 2, 1959.

When they stepped into Stratford that day, they became the first students to desegregate a public school in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Many Arlingtonians know that theirs was the first county in Virginia to desegregate. It is a point of pride. But it’s not the whole story.

It is a story that is sometimes difficult. One that offers few easy answers. It’s a story about how “desegregation” doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing as “integration.” It’s the story of how a coalition of primarily Black activists and white moderates spurred progress, sometimes haltingly, and often with great difficulty.

These two groups were not always in agreement, but together they were able—gradually, over several decades—to turn the tide of race relations in Arlington, reversing the oppressive rule of Jim Crow.

Education Under Jim Crow

Arlington, like all of Virginia—and the entire South—was a segregated society in the first half of the 20th century. A complex set of laws governed race relations, limiting the access of Black citizens to a variety of social services and businesses.

Together these laws were known as “Jim Crow” laws, a term that can be traced to a song popularized by the blackface entertainer Thomas D. Rice in the 1830s. After the end of Reconstruction, when Federal enforcement of racial equality ended in the South, Southern states began to establish new laws to keep the races separate.

 

Jim Crow in Arlington

Front page of the Virginia Health Bulletin from March 1942, showing the headline "To Preserve Racial Integrity"

"The New Virginia Law to Preserve Racial Integrity," from Virginia Health Bulletin, vol. XVI, March 1924, Extra No. 2

In Virginia, Jim Crow took many forms. It was even enshrined in the new Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia, established in 1902. The new constitution disenfranchised many Black citizens by means of voting restrictions. In the section describing public schools, it stipulated that “White and colored children shall not be taught in the same school.”

Another important law was the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. This act was specifically designed to prohibit miscegenation, or “race-mixing.” It defined “whites” as only those people "who [have] no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian." To preserve whiteness, the act prevented marriage between whites and nonwhites, who were described in the law as “colored.” It required that every birth certificate issued in the Commonwealth state the race of each infant. It also required the forced sterilization of Virginia citizens found to be “mentally ill” or “mentally deficient.”

In addition to the Virginia Constitution and state laws like the Racial Integrity Act, Jim Crow took the form of numerous local ordinances as well as property covenants that prohibited selling homes in certain neighborhoods to “colored” citizens.

 

Black Public Education in Arlington County Before 1947

Typed front cover of a dissertation from 1951 on white paper

Public Education for Negroes in Arlington County, Virginia, from 1870 to 1950, Dissertation by Ophelia Braden Taylor, June 1951.

Prior to the Civil War, it had been illegal for Blacks to gather together for purposes of education, whether they were free or enslaved. For that matter, there had not been a system of public schools for white students either. Virginia had historically been opposed to public schools, as had most of the South. Private schools served the Commonwealth’s population of white elites.

After the Civil War, however, Virginia began to establish public schools. In 1870, Arlington County (then known as Alexandria County) established three public schools: the whites-only Columbia and Walker schools and the Arlington School for Negroes in Freedman’s Village, a settlement of freed former slaves on the federally seized grounds of Robert E. Lee’s Arlington plantation.

The history of Black public education in Arlington between 1870 and 1950 is told eloquently and in great depth in Ophelia Braden Taylor’s 1951 Public Education for Negroes in Arlington County, Virginia from 1870 to 1950, which she completed while working on a Master of Arts in Education at Howard University.

This document came to the Arlington Public Library’s Center for Local History as part of the papers of George Melvin Richardson, former principal of Hoffman-Boston Junior-Senior High School. It is an invaluable and thoroughly researched document that is almost certainly still the best history of the topic to date.

 

NAACP Advocacy for Better Schools

Until 1932, public education for people of color in Arlington was limited to primary school. Hoffman-Boston Junior High School (later Hoffman-Boston Junior-Senior High School) opened that year, allowing Black Arlingtonians to pursue secondary school within the county.

However, Hoffman-Boston was not accredited by the state until the 1950s, and its facilities were not up to the standards of the county’s whites-only schools. Many Black students still commuted to Washington, D.C. to get a secondary education.

As early as 1941, the Arlington chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) brought pressure to bear on the county School Board for better facilities. And in 1947, the NAACP brought a suit against Arlington County Public Schools, asserting that the education provided to Black students was not up to the standards of the white schools. The suit would lead to new investment in the county’s Black schools.

 

1941: Esther Cooper’s Campaign for Better Schools

Unfolded, typewriter written letter on stationary bearing the Butler-Holmes Citizens Association letterhead, with pencil scrawl across the top that reads "Also ? ? NAACP"

Letter to Jackson Ross of the Arlington County School Board from Filmore Peyton, President, and Esther Cooper, Secretary, of the Butler-Holmes Citizens Association, dated March 18, 1947. The letter asks for additional funds from a county bond issue to finance the building of a new Hoffman-Boston High School and improvements to Kemper and Langston elementary schools.

Thirteen high school seniors graduated from Hoffman-Boston in 1941, the school’s first graduating class. In the seven years since these students had advanced to junior high, neither the junior high nor the high school had received accreditation from the state. The facilities in the former elementary school were limited, and teachers often had to teach multiple subjects. While the teachers at Hoffman-Boston were considered to be excellent educators, the school’s small faculty simply couldn’t offer the same variety of courses that the larger all-white Washington-Lee High School could.

Nearly three-quarters of Black students in Arlington who were of age to attend junior or senior high school were either attending schools in Washington D.C. or were not attending school at all.

Esther Cooper, president of the Arlington chapter of the NAACP, believed the School Board could and should do better. Cooper began to contact parents in the school district, urging them to pressure the School Board for changes. The Butler-Holmes Citizens’ Association soon joined the NAACP in pressuring the School Board for these reforms.

Throughout the decade, Cooper continually advocated for several improvements: separate buildings for the junior and senior high school programs; better facilities and more teachers to allow for a fuller curriculum; and accreditation for both the junior and senior high school programs.

In this 1947 letter from the Butler-Holmes Citizens’ Association, signed by Esther Cooper, we see these demands reiterated six years after her campaign initially began.

 

1950: Constance Carter v. School Board of Arlington County

Densely typewritten page on legal paper, with fold creases

Narrative detailing activities of members of the Arlington Branch, NAACP, and other concerned citizens to compare white and African-American schools in Arlington and their legal actions regarding school equality.

In 1946, the District of Columbia school system announced that students from Arlington who attended D.C. schools would have to pay tuition. This presented a special difficulty to Arlington’s Black community. Black public schools in Arlington did not have the same resources as those of the county’s white schools or schools in the District. Moreover, the tuition represented a larger burden for most Black Arlingtonians, who made less on average than the county’s white citizens.

Urged on by the NAACP, the Arlington School Board agreed to pay tuition for the remainder of the year for Arlington students enrolled in D.C. schools. During the next few months, however, there were few signs that progress was being made toward improved facilities or offering more classes for Black students in the county.

On the opening day of the next school year, September 3, 1947, Constance Carter, a Black high school student in Arlington, arrived at the all-white Washington-Lee High School. Her mother, NAACP member Eleanor Taylor, accompanied her. Together they attempted to enroll Constance at the school, stating that Hoffman-Boston did not offer the classes she wished to take, including Spanish, typewriting, and physical education.

Typewritten page of a legal file on yellowing paper

Civil Action No. 331 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Columbia, Alexandria Division.

Washington-Lee principal Claude Richmond refused Carter’s request, citing the Commonwealth’s requirement that all public education be segregated. Carter and Taylor, represented by NAACP attorneys Spottswood W. Robinson III and Martin A. Martin, then filed a lawsuit against the county schools.

Typewritten first page of a legal opinion, on yellowing paper with numerous fold marks, and missing a chunk out of the bottom, obscuring section of the last 2 lines of the page.

Constance Carter v. The School Board of Arlington County, Virginia: Complaint and opinion, 1950. This is the May 31, 1950 opinion of Martin A. Soper, delivered May 31, 1950, overturning Albert Bryan's dismissal of Carter's 14th Amendment case.

Robinson and Martin saw this as a Fourteenth Amendment “equal protection” case. Although Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) held that equal protection and equal rights are not abridged as long as public facilities and services are “separate but equal,” public education for Blacks in Arlington was demonstrably unequal. While the presiding District Judge Albert V. Bryan acknowledged the inequality of facilities and classes offered, he did not accept that this resulted from an intentional disparity. He ruled instead that it was a result of “defects of administration for administrative correction, not constitutional offenses for judicial interference."

Upon appeal, however, federal judge Martin A. Soper reversed the decision, ruling for Carter on May 31, 1950. He then ordered Judge Bryan to notify the School Board that they would be required to provide equal facilities for the county’s Black students.

In the next few years, the pay rate for Black teachers in Arlington was raised to meet that of white teachers, and money was earmarked for improvements to the facilities of Hoffman-Boston and other Black schools.

 

1954: Arlington in the Wake of Brown v. Board of Education

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled on Brown v. Board of Education. In a unanimous decision, the court reversed the case law of Plessy v. Ferguson. Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the high court, held: “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

Brown v. Board of Education sent shockwaves throughout the South, including Virginia. For some, especially in the Black community, it was hailed as a great victory. For others, largely white, it was seen as a threat to their very way of life.

In the capital of Richmond, U.S. Senator Harry Flood Byrd and his tightly controlled political machine began to gear up a program known as “Massive Resistance,” intended to defy the Supreme Court ruling by any means necessary, including shutting down the schools if need be. The state removed Arlington’s democratically elected School Board and installed a new board more sympathetic to the segregationist cause.

But there was another group at play in Arlington, one that proved instrumental in the story of desegregation: white racial moderates, who may not have minded segregation but didn’t want to lose their school system over it. In the end, they were pivotal in advancing the cause of desegregation over the objections of much of the appointed School Board.

 

1955: Massive Resistance

Front page of official report with state seal, hand written notes on the bottom half in blue pen, and various geometric doodles on the top half. Note include things like: "SALES TAX - DON'T SEE IT THIS TIME" "1. Stop price fixing on milk" "10. Workmans comp. law to cover those on civil defense"

A copy of the Gray Commission report ("Public Education Report of the Commission to the Governor of Virginia"), with notes handwritten on the front page regarding price-fixing and raising teacher salaries.

On the day of the Brown decision, Senator Harry F. Byrd issued a statement saying that the ruling would “bring implications and dangers of the greatest consequence. It is the most serious blow that has yet been struck against the rights of the states in a matter vitally affecting their authority and welfare.”

In 1955, the state released the Gray Commission Report on Public Education. The report was created by a group of politicians, lawyers, and academics from around the state selected by segregationist Governor Thomas B. Stanley. The commission advised getting rid of state laws requiring mandatory school attendance. No child should be required to attend an integrated school, they argued, against their parents’ wishes. Rather, the “parents of those children who object to integrated schools, or who live in communities wherein no public schools are operated, [should] be given tuition grants for educational purposes.” (Emphasis added.)

The Gray Report, in other words, recommended offering a back door, so that schools could be shut down rather than be forced to integrate. This policy was adopted, and the next year Governor Thomas Stanley pushed through a legislative agenda that included a law allowing the allocation of public school money for tuition grants to students attending segregation academies.

Cover page of Virginia State Senate document with the state seal, on yellow paper, and two holes punched on the left.

Address of Governor Thos. B. Stanley to the General Assembly submitting a bill for a referendum on holding a Constitutional Convention to amend Section 141 of the Constitution of Virginia. 4 pages

The blueprint also cut all state funding for and gave the governor authority to shut down any school system that desegregated. Together, the package of 13 segregationist statutes came to be known as the “Stanley Plan.”

 

Virginia’s top elected officials made it clear: they would shut down the schools before they would integrate.

 

Popular Opposition to Integration

It wasn’t just the Richmond power structure that was strongly opposed to getting rid of segregated schools. Many, if not most, white Virginians were opposed to desegregation in 1954. Here we have a selection of pro-segregation literature gathered locally primarily by Barbara Marx, a German-born NAACP member and activist who lived in Arlington during the 1950s.

A warning: The documents linked on this page contain some fairly vitriolic racism. Please be advised. They are included because it is impossible to fully understand segregation without understanding racism. Their inclusion on this site is in no way an endorsement of their content.

One thing that might be jarring for contemporary readers is the way that many of these documents rely strongly on Christian-inflected rhetoric. After all, many leaders of the Civil Rights movement were Christian ministers themselves. So why is this?

There is a long tradition of religious justification for racism that goes back to America’s history of slavery. Some have argued that Black people are the descendants of Canaan, the grandson of Noah who was cursed and cast out by his grandfather for his father Ham’s transgression. The descendants of Canaan were said to be cursed with eternal slavery.

The Old Testament has frequent mentions of slavery, and the idea of a people doomed to eternal slavery likely appealed to religious individuals looking for a justification for the institution of chattel slavery.

It is also important to remember that this literature was produced in the early 1950s, during the early years of the Cold War. The American Communist Party had been one of the most consistently racially progressive political organizations in the United States throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Many segregationists argued that integration was a Communist plan, a Soviet plot to destroy America from within. It was not uncommon for segregationists to describe the NAACP in particular as a Communist organization.

Christian Americanism was offered as a healthy alternative to Communist Atheism, and for this reason, Christian justifications of the racial order under Jim Crow were seen as a perfect rebuttal to Soviet criticisms of America’s system of racial apartheid.

 

Arlington School Board Reacts to the Brown Decision

One page House Bill, printed in black ink on white paper with two punch holes on the left side.

House Bill No. 340 Offered. Bill to repeal 22-84 through 22-88.1 of the Code of Virginia relating to the election of members of school boards in certain counties. This bill was aimed at the elected members of the Arlington County School Board, disbanding the elected board and replacing it with one that was appointed.

Just ten days after the Brown decision, the Arlington County School Board called for a “Committee to Study Problems of Integration in the Arlington Public School District,” to look at how best to comply with the ruling. The committee included Black and white clergy, teachers, and three NAACP members: Edith Burton, Mary Shirley, and Geraldine Davis. Elizabeth Campbell, a white liberal and pro-integration member of the School Board headed the committee.

By January 1956, the committee had a preliminary plan in place to desegregate the school system. The committee’s proposal was not particularly bold or far-reaching. It favored only a small number of students desegregating the schools, at least at first. It was a conservative, incremental strategy.

It was also one that had the disadvantage of pleasing very few. Some integrationists, such as Virginia NAACP President E.B. Henderson, saw it as trying to do the minimum amount of integration legally required under Brown, to reassure the New York guarantors of an upcoming school bond issue.

On the other side was the Byrd machine in Richmond. Less than a month after the Integration Committee issued its plan, legislation was introduced in the General Assembly to strip Arlington County of the right to have an elected school board. At the time, Arlington was the only county in the country whose school board was popularly elected.

The bill passed, and in July, 1956, the Arlington School Board was replaced with a new group of appointees, chosen by the County Board. This new panel was considerably more sympathetic to the cause of segregation, with a membership that included few racial moderates and some outspoken segregationists.

 

Arlington’s Racial Moderates

Copy of one page typed document on white paper, with darkened mimeograph marks in corners.

What I Think About Segregation, Integration, and the Public Schools, by Leo Ubanske. Document by County Board member Leo Urbanske stating his commitment to public schools and Arlington County.

Due to a particular set of historical circumstances, Arlington’s population differed from much of Virginia in terms of racial attitudes. Prior to the 1930s, the county had been primarily rural. The expansion of the federal government during the New Deal, followed by even more federal growth after America’s entry into World War II, quickly reshaped the county.

People from all over the country flocked to the Washington area for new jobs, and Arlington was an affordable place to live. The completion of the Pentagon in early 1943 made the military one of the largest employers in the county.

This influx included a large number of new residents from the less-segregated North. Likewise, the importance of the defense industry and the military to Arlington meant that more people had experienced some degree of desegregation already—executive orders signed by President Roosevelt in 1941 and President Truman in 1948 respectively barred racial discrimination by defense contractors and ended segregation within the military.

The result was that many white residents in Arlington could be called “racial moderates.” Many may not have minded segregated schools—and some may have indeed favored segregation—but they were far more concerned with the prospect of the public school system being closed down altogether.

Because Arlington’s economy was so dependent on the federal government, political participation was complicated. The Hatch Act of 1939 limited the participation of federal workers in partisan politics, so Arlington residents created “non-partisan” groups to advocate for local change, with names like “The Citizens Committee,” and “Arlingtonians for a Better County,” “ABC” as it came to be known.

Prior to the influx of newcomers, the public schools in Arlington had a poor reputation, and those who could manage sent their children to D.C. or boarding schools. When people from outside the South came to Arlington for government jobs, they wanted their children to have strong public schools, like the ones they grew up attending. Many supporters of ABC shared such memories. As a result, the group made school improvement a major issue.

Some ABC politicians viewed the threat of wholesale closure of the public school system to be an almost existential threat. It was due to an ABC campaign that Arlington won the right to have an elected school board in January of 1949. They did not appreciate the state taking that right away.

The new, appointed School Board would be repeatedly confronted with the fact that for many Arlingtonians, keeping the schools open was more important than maintaining segregation.

 

1956-1959: The Road to Stratford

By 1956, Virginia seemed in many ways to be no closer to desegregating its public schools than it had before Brown v. Board of Education. The NAACP decided it was time to put forward lawsuits to try to make the Commonwealth comply with Brown. The case of Clarissa Thompson v. the County School Board of Arlington was part of an effort to push Virginia school districts where segregation was most vulnerable. The case dragged on, however, bogged down in bureaucracy and legal back-and-forth.

Meanwhile, white racial moderates in the county formed the Arlington Committee to Preserve Public Schools, which later would grow into a statewide organization, the Virginia Committee to Preserve Public Schools. This organization was distinctly agnostic toward the issue of segregation and simply advocated against the closing of public schools, bringing pressure to bear on government officials.

On February 2, 1959, having exhausted all legal and bureaucratic maneuvers, Arlington Public Schools had no choice but to admit four Black pupils into the previously all-white Stratford Junior High School. Perhaps surprisingly, this occurred without protests or negative incident. The state did not shut down Arlington County Public Schools. It is largely remembered, as an oft-repeated headline described it, as “the day nothing happened.”

 

1956: Clarissa Thompson v. the County School Board of Arlington is filed

Page 1 of 13 page court filing, typewritten on legal paper

Court Case, Clarissa S. Thompson, et al. v. County School Board Of Arlington County, Virginia, et al, Civil 1341

As the second anniversary of the Brown decision approached, opponents of segregation in Arlington had seen almost no progress in the implementation of the ruling. Finally, on May 17, 1956—the second anniversary of the original Brown ruling—Virginia NAACP lawyer Edwin C. Brown filed suit against Arlington County’s School Board. The NAACP filed similar suits in Front Royal, Newport News, Norfolk, Charlottesville, and Warren County.

Cover of 17 page typewritten document on legal paper. Cover page is light green.

Brief On Behalf Of Appellees For Case No. 7310 In The United States Court Of Appeals For The United States District Court For The Eastern District Of Virginia, Alexandria Division

Suits were filed in these places because they had particular things in common—they were areas with low Black populations, with larger than average populations of white racial moderates, and where the Byrd machine was absent or not particularly powerful. These shared traits, the thinking went, meant that they might be more open to desegregation.

Clarissa Thompson, daughter of NAACP member Ethel Thompson, was the first name on the suit, but it was brought on behalf of several students, including the children of civil rights activists Lesley and Dorothy Hamm and the children of Barbara Marx, one of the few active white members of the Arlington NAACP.

Newspaper clipping taped to white paper

Article from Daily News, "Arlington Family Gets Out of Integration Suit" June 4, 1956.

The child of another white family was initially named in the suit, but that family dropped out after two weeks after receiving telephoned threats. Barbara Marx, who had been in Nazi Germany as a young woman, was undeterred by similar threats.

first page of two page typed document on white paper

Timeline and chronological series of events, court decisions, etc., relating to Arlington County and desegregation of public schools.

Federal Judge Albert Bryan, who had been the first judge on the Constance Carter case, ordered the schools to be integrated, but the particular wording of his injunction stated that the students could only come back to the court to seek enforcement of that order if they could prove that they had gone through all appropriate bureaucratic channels. This included the Commonwealth’s Pupil Placement Board, a body that had been created in Richmond that summer and had ultimate power over placement of students.

The case at that point was plunged into a complex set of appeals and bureaucratic red tape that would last two and a half years.

 

1958: Arlington Committee to Preserve Public Schools

As the NAACP pressed on with the Thompson case with repeated success, the moment was quickly approaching when the Commonwealth, to keep schools segregated, would have to use the only other tool at its disposal—closing the schools.

Single page typed list of agreements and members on white paper

Flyer: "To All Arlington Citizens": announcing the formation of the "interim Organizing Committee to Preserve Public Schools", May 11, 1958.

On May 1, 1958, the Arlington Committee to Preserve Public Schools, recently formed by a small group of white racial moderates and integrationists, issued a statement that expressed a willingness to “pursue every legal means to keep public schools open.” The group further expressed absolute agnosticism about the issue of segregation and a distrust of the idea of giving public funds to private education.

By the time of the following month’s meeting of the organization, the group numbered over 700 members.

Over the next few months, the organization served as an important point of communication for those opposed to closing schools, including concerned citizens, administrators, and a majority of the county’s parent-teacher associations.

The Arlington Committee to Preserve Public Schools was all white, and in limiting membership to white people it was able to gather and rally a disparate group of white racial moderates. Dr. O. Glenn Stahl, president of the organization, claimed that it represented:

a very broad segment of the population, including many, many people who much prefer to have segregation. Therefore it’s not an integrationist group. But it is concerned about keeping the public schools open and not letting the public schools be sacrificed in order to settle the question of integration.

By assembling a large group of racial moderates who were more concerned with keeping schools open than with one another’s views on integration, the Arlington Committee to Preserve Public Schools was able to exert pressure on local and state politicians. They made closing the schools—the “nuclear option” upon which Massive Resistance depended—a far less attractive option to the appointed county School Board and state officials.

While the NAACP used the courts to pressure the schools to desegregate, the Committee pressured the segregationist-leaning School Board to commit to keeping the schools open. The organization would soon grow into a statewide one, the Virginia Committee to Preserve Public Schools, which would use much the same strategy throughout the Commonwealth.

View more Arlington Committee to Preserve Public Schools documents on the Project DAPS site.

 

February 2, 1959

By January of 1959, the state had exhausted all its legal countermeasures to the Thompson case. Many Arlington parents were still worried that the School Board would choose to close the schools rather than desegregate. The final nail in the coffin of Massive Resistance came on January 19, when the Virginia Supreme Court struck down the school closure law, ruling that it violated the guarantee of a free public education in the Virginia Constitution.

On January 22, 1959, the School Board held a special meeting and announced that Stratford Junior High would be the first school to be desegregated.

Finally, on February 2, four students—Gloria Thompson, Ronald Deskins, Lance Newman (oral history), and Michael Jones (oral history)—walked up to Stratford just after the first bell at 8:45 a.m. The four students lived nearby but gathered at a single house that morning before walking the last bit together. Close to 100 police officers formed a cordon along the road leading to the school. The memory was still fresh of the angry white mobs that formed in Little Rock, Arkansas when that school was desegregated a little more than a year earlier.

Single page magazine article with photo at the top left column

Article by David L. Krupsaw, Chairman of the Arlington County Board, "The Day Nothing Happened", The ADL Bulletin, February 1959.

Ultimately, the desegregation of Stratford arrived without incident. There were no angry mobs, no shouted words, no brickbats. Stratford principal Claude Richmond—the same man who, as principal of Washington-Lee, had turned away Constance Carter in 1947—welcomed the students. By all accounts, Richmond made every effort for the new students to feel welcome and safe.

Despite the police and reporters, it was essentially a normal day at school. The newsletter of the Anti-Defamation League, reporting on the desegregation of Arlington schools, ran the headline: “The Day Nothing Happened.” And that seems to have been the case, for the most part.

 

After Stratford

When four Black students entered Stratford Junior High School for the first time, it did not signal an end to segregation in Virginia, or even in Arlington. Desegregation is not integration. While Arlington had taken the first step by allowing a few students to break through the wall of segregation, most students would continue to attend largely segregated schools. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1971 that Arlington adopted a pupil-placement system that was sufficiently non-race-based to gain court approval.

Moreover, many places in Arlington still excluded Blacks, from lunch counters to taxis, and even the local hospital.

 

Desegregation is Not Integration

On December 27, 1962, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in an address to a church conference in Nashville, “…desegregation alone is empty and shallow. We must always be aware of the fact that our ultimate goal is integration, and that desegregation is only a first step on the road to the good society.”

Desegregation and integration are two very different things. “Desegregation” occurs when a small opportunity allows some people past the wall of segregation. “Integration” occurs when a population reaches parity when the wall of segregation no longer exists.

Gloria Thompson, Michael Jones, Ronald Deskins, and Lance Newman entered Stratford Junior High School in 1959. Over the next few years, other schools would begin to desegregate. But it is important not to confuse that desegregation with integration. It took years before Arlington approached true integration of its public schools. It required not just gradual change over time but more advocacy, struggle, and at least one more major lawsuit.

Moreover, much of the county outside of the school system was still very much segregated. That, too, took time, campaigning, and organizing to change.

The documents collected here represent the reality of the segregation that persisted in Arlington years after Stratford: from bowling alleys to housing to the local hospital.

Single page typed sheet on white paper

Broadside: The Negro Citizen in Arlington published by the American Council on Human Relations

A 1963 broadside titled “The Negro Citizen in Arlington” shows the true depth of the segregation that remained. Among the injustices that the document catalogs: all the movie theaters and drive-ins in Arlington were whites-only; there were no decent sit-down restaurants that allowed Blacks to eat in their dining rooms; the maternity ward at Arlington Hospital would not admit Black mothers.

The document closes with a defiant tone, pointing to the constant precarious state of Black life in Arlington, even in the face of growing legal equality:

It is the uncertainty about so many aspects of his life that is trying for a Negro in Arlington. Some years ago he knew exactly what his limitations were. He didn’t like being limited but he knew what to expect. Now he is tired of being unknowing about his status.

The Negro knows that merit hiring permits him to apply for and, if he is qualified, to receive a Civil Service job in the Arlington community. He does not know to what extent racial prejudice may influence the decisions of the department head who is responsible for his promotions.

The Negro knows that by Federal Law his children are now guaranteed public school education on a non-segregated basis. He does not know how long it will be before Negroes in Arlington can expect that without individual court appeals, their children will all be accepted in neighborhood schools just as other children are.

 

1959-1962: Desegregating Sports and Dances

Even with the schools technically desegregated, certain elements of day-to-day school life were still segregated. Dances and athletics, in particular, were for a period eliminated at all desegregated schools. Such activities were a particular source of fear for segregationists, as both put students’ bodies in close proximity.

For people who opposed integrated schools due to the racist specter of miscegenation—who feared that integrated schools threatened “racial purity” by encouraging mixed-race relationships—the idea of integrated sports, and especially integrated dances, was particularly worrisome.

This refusal to desegregate certain elements of school life, even in the face of Judge Bryan’s order, was supported by a Massive Resistance-era law passed in Richmond. School Board member and attorney L. Lee Bean read the law—Joint Resolution #97—during a School Board meeting on September 21, 1959: “No athletic team of any public free school should engage in any athletic contest of any nature within the State of Virginia with another team on which persons of the white and colored race are members…” The Board voted that day to cease all athletic events. The same day, they also voted to stop all school-sponsored dances.

The Board reinstated athletic programs for the 1961-1962 school year, but it was even longer before school dances came back. Meanwhile, other groups in Arlington provided space and opportunity for these important social functions for school children. In an oral history in the collection of the Arlington Public Library’s Center for Local History, School Board member James Stockard recalled that Mount Olivet United Methodist Church held dances during the school system’s ban.

In another oral history, Constance McAdam, who at the time worked in the county’s Department of Parks and Recreation, discussed a program of integrated dances for teenagers sponsored by the Parks department between 1959 and 1962. McAdam recalls “tension” at some events during the first few years—they even had the police come to keep an eye on things—but reported that the tensions dissipated to a degree over time.

Read related documents on the Project DAPS site.

 

1961: Drew Elementary Expansion

Hand written cover of 9 page packet including a notice about School Board Action

Packet of papers related to a July 1, 1971 meeting about the Drew Elementary desegregation plan. Include a statement from a group of local ministers, organizing phone list, and extracts from the board action.

Only a few years after the desegregation of Stratford, the next issue to divide the county over race and the school system came from what might seem an unlikely source: a portion of a planned bond issue to improve and expand Drew Elementary School in Arlington’s historically Black Nauck/Green Valley neighborhood.

In 1961, the School Board proposed that a section of an upcoming bond issue be put toward a 22-room addition to the extant Drew School and a consolidation of the Drew, Kemper, and Drew Annex schools, which were all in the same general neighborhood. The local NAACP, the Nauck Civic Association, and the Jennie Dean Community Center, among others, opposed the plan.

It might strike the reader as strange that the NAACP would in 1961 be spearheading an effort to oppose improvements to a Black school when, as recently as the Carter case in 1950, they had been suing the School Board for exactly that. But Brown v. Board of Education changed everything, especially the NAACP’s approach to how best to improve schooling for Black students.

Typewritten letter on white paper with pencil markings

Letter from Esther Cooper, Jennie Dean Community Center Association, about opposition to Drew School expansion, October 18, 1961

Prior to Brown, the Plessy ruling was still the law of the land. “Separate but equal” was viewed, legally, as fair and constitutional and was used as a standard for judging whether a law or policy was legal under the 14th Amendment. Facing this reality, the NAACP’s best strategy was to prove that facilities and educational opportunities for Black students were unequal.

After Brown, however, the NAACP’s goals changed. Integration was seen as the best means to attain quality education for Black students—they could simply go to the schools that were already systemically better.

The Black communities in south Arlington were not completely unified around the rejection of the Drew Elementary expansion, however. For some in these communities, it seemed a good idea to improve and expand the neighborhood elementary school, even if it was segregated.

The NAACP responded with an education campaign. The expansion, the group argued, would make the school too large to be manageable, at almost 1,200 students. This was by far larger than any other elementary school in the county. They pointed to a recommendation from the National Educational Association that elementary schools should ideally be limited to around five hundred students. Even with 22 new rooms, they further argued, 1,200 students would result in an unmanageable number of students in each classroom.

Opponents of the expansion suggested an alternative: a new school to be built about a mile northeast of Drew on the site of Douglas Park. Because of its location, this new school would draw equally from nearby white and Black neighborhoods and would lessen the overcrowding of Drew and Kemper.

Front cover of 8 page sermon, typed on white paper

Typewritten Sermon, A Newcomer Looks at Drew-Kemper, Rev. Edward Redman, Unitarian Church of Arlington, October 29, 1961.

As the NAACP attempted outreach within the Black community, white allies of desegregation tried to spread the same message to white Arlingtonians. The Reverend Richard H. Redman, minister of the Unitarian Church of Arlington, delivered a sermon on the topic in October of 1961.

The movement against the Drew expansion found its most powerful white proponent in School Board member James Stockard. He went on record calling the expansion “discriminatory” and a “segregation move.” In one Board meeting, Stockard declared that if the plans for expansion went forward he would “have to exert [m]y full influence in this county toward defeat of the school bond issue.”

NAACP representative Robert Alexander called out in response, “At least there’s one Christian in the house!”

Ultimately, however, Stockard was outnumbered. The Board approved the measure, and when it went up for a vote before the county’s general population on November 7, 1961, the bond issue was approved. The county would move forward with plans for the Drew expansion.

Construction of the Drew expansion began in 1963.

 

1971: Desegregating Drew Elementary

copy of first page of 6 page letter, typed on yellowing paper

Letter from an Arlington attorney, Lee Bean, to William F. Kay, executive secretary of the Arlington Education Association advising the validity of the Drew School's de facto segregation. Letter makes comparisons to many national and local court cases regarding segregation in public schools. October 19, 1969

By 1969, Arlington’s junior and senior high schools were all desegregated. Hoffman-Boston Junior-Senior High School had closed in 1964, and Black students were placed in formerly all-white schools. At the elementary school level, however, there were still two schools that were virtually entirely Black.

The recently expanded Drew Elementary School and Hoffman-Boston Elementary School were both located in Arlington’s largest Black community. There had only been a handful of white students who attended either school in the ten years after public schools in Arlington ostensibly desegregated, and those students were only placed in the schools after their parents had requested admission.

On December 11, 1969, a group of around thirty parents of Drew students met at the headquarters of the Arlington Community Action Program and decided to ask the School Board at its January meeting “why it [was] ignoring the law of the land.” Chief among the parents’ concerns was that students from Drew were having considerably more difficulty adjusting to desegregated junior high compared with other Black students in the county who had attended integrated elementary schools.

Lawyer Thomas R. Monroe and education expert Dr. Donald K. Sharpes were also in attendance and explained to the group that they had been pressing the issue of desegregating Drew with the School Board since May. They vowed to “exhaust all channels of communication” with the Board and, if that didn’t work, to sue. A community task force was set up to explore the issue with other Nauck residents.

Front page of 5 page legal document, printed in black font on yellowing paper

John K. Hart, Et Al, vs. County School Board Of Arlington County, Virginia, Et Al, Interrogatories, June 1970

In May of 1970, feeling that the School Board was still not listening to the community’s concerns, ten parents filed a class-action suit on behalf of sixteen Drew students: John E. Hart et al. v. County School Board of Arlington County, Virginia.

Just a little more than a month before the trial, on June 28, 1971, the School Board announced that it had arrived at a plan to desegregate Drew and Hoffman-Boston. Students in grades one through six of the two schools would be bused to other elementary schools throughout the district.

Students would be assigned to new schools in a way that tried to keep the Black population of each school as nearly as possible to 11% of the school’s total enrollment. (At this time Black people were about 11% of Arlington’s population.)

This new plan was not satisfactory to many in the community who felt it was essentially a plan to bus-only the Black students. They argued that the plan put too much of the burden of desegregation on the same children who had already been forced to endure the indignities of segregation. This argument was pressed in an amended complaint before Judge Oren R. Lewis on August 10, 1971.

Copy of one page, typed document on white paper, with hand written notes. "Joanne Booth" handwritten at top of page but not clear if she is the author or recipient of document.

Letter/Document concerning remedy/remedies to the problem of school children who've been isolated from most other students their age because of segregation, zoning lines, etc. Advocates for a "compensatory education" program to help isolated students make up for time lost. unattributed and undated

Lewis was unconvinced. He quoted previous case law stating that whether or not the district could have closed down different schools was immaterial; the question was “whether the Board's decision is so unfair that it amounts to invidious discrimination in violation of the equal protection clause.”

Lewis saw no such “invidious discrimination” in the desegregation plan and ruled in the School Board’s favor. “If Arlington is to convert to a unitary system, and the Supreme Court has decreed that it must—there will of necessity be some busing. The limited busing of the Drew-Hoffman-Boston children, here required, risks neither the health of the children nor significantly impinges on the educational process.”

He further pronounced that “The Arlington County School Board has now fully complied with the Supreme Court decision in Brown…Arlington will have neither black nor white schools—just schools.”

This decision was upheld on appeal on May 1, 1972.

 

 

 

 

Conclusion

colorized photo of high school black and white boys sitting on the bleachers in track uniforms

Wakefield Warriors, 1968

Arlington desegregated and was the first public school system to do so in the Commonwealth of Virginia. This is often a point of pride for Arlingtonians, and rightly so.

But it is also important to remember that it took almost eighteen years of activism from the NAACP and Arlington’s Black communities to get to that point. And that it took almost five years for Arlington to desegregate their first school after Brown v. Board of Education.

Likewise, it took another twelve years after the desegregation of Stratford before Arlington had a desegregation plan in place sufficient for a court to consider it in compliance with Brown v. Board of Education.

The story told by the documents presented on this site is one that is complex and occasionally frustrating. But it is a story of progress. Not progress in the form of some slow, natural process, but the progress that was hard-won after years of pressure, political maneuvering, and lawsuits by the NAACP and other organizations within the community.

What is heartening is that this sort of pressure worked--that it changed minds and hearts and the material reality of Black students in the county.

It is also heartening to note the role of the white racial moderates in the county. The people who formed the Arlington Committee to Preserve Public Schools were not of one mind about desegregation. Some members were opposed to it. But they felt that keeping the public schools open was more important than maintaining segregation. The lesson here is that, with enough pressure and activism, the center can, indeed, be moved. That minds can be changed when you show them how they, too, have a stake in the decisions made.

We would love to hear from you. How does this story relate to your story?

We hope that this exhibit and these documents will become the start of a broader conversation about segregation in its many forms, about what integration truly means, and about race in Arlington County more broadly.

 

January 11, 2018 by Web Editor Filed Under: Center for Local History, News Tagged With: Hoffman-Boston

Video: Memories of Hoffman Boston

Published: October 19, 2012

Reminiscences by Hoffman-Boston Teachers, Students and Parents

Presented on September 20, 2012, at Central Library,  as part of the Virginia Room’s ongoing Arlington Reunion series.

Hoffman-Boston High School was created in South Arlington as a segregated junior high school for African Americans.  It later served as the County’s first high school, and closed after graduating its last full class in 1964.

The school was later reopened as Hoffman Boston Elementary in the Oakridge neighborhood, and remains part of the Arlington schools system.

The program included screening of footage of the 1964 Hoffman-Boston Homecoming celebration, depicting the queen’s court, parade and homecoming football game, which Mr. Milton Rowe Sr.  has donated to the Virginia Room.

 

Learn more about Local History at Arlington Public Library.

 

October 19, 2012 by Web Editor Filed Under: Center for Local History, News Tagged With: Hoffman-Boston, local history news

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