The death of segregation

-- NORFOLK One photograph shows a black student sitting alone and expressionless in a Norfolk high school auditorium in 1959, shunned by his white classmates.

Another shows an effigy of a black person, labeled with racial slurs, hanging from a tree right outside the school's front door.

The black-and-white photos are part of a new exhibit at Norfolk's Chrysler Museum commemorating the 50th anniversary of the end of Massive Resistance, Virginia's last-ditch attempt to preserve school segregation. The exhibit is scheduled to run through March 1.

On Friday, city and museum officials opened the exhibit to reporters and some of the people who stood amid the storm a half-century ago.

"I hope this will help people remember," said Andrew Heidelberg, one of 17 black students -- the "Norfolk 17" -- who endured threats and abuse to become the first to integrate Norfolk schools.

Heidelberg, a 65-year-old retired banker, recalled walking to school on the morning of Feb. 2, 1959, and seeing an agitated crowd of white people, news reporters and police with guns. At the end of the school day, the principal kept him after school until 5 p.m. without explanation. Heidelberg later heard that an angry crowd had waited outside the school with baseball bats.

Across the exhibit room, Harvey Eluto, a sixty-something white man, pointed to an old photo of himself waiting in line to sign a petition asking the state to reopen six all-white Norfolk schools it closed in 1958 in a final effort to stop them from being integrated. That maneuver suddenly left roughly 10,000 white Norfolk students with nowhere to attend school.

"I wanted the black students admitted," Eluto recalled. "Mostly I wanted the school reopened so I could finish. I was a [high-school] senior."

The exhibit at the Chrysler is not extensive; a person can digest it thoroughly in an hour. Its timeline begins with the landmark 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, which approved "separate but equal" facilities for blacks and whites; and the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that essentially reversed it.

It chronicles the Supreme Court's order that federal judges execute school integration "with all deliberate speed," and the various subterfuges employed by Norfolk and Virginia authorities to try to fight back -- a collection of laws and policies known collectively as Massive Resistance.

After Norfolk federal Judge Walter E. Hoffman ordered Norfolk to desegregate its schools, the Norfolk School Board produced a disingenuous system to determine whether black students "qualified" to attend white schools.

The School Board initially rejected all 151 of the black applicants, but after Hoffman threatened to throw some board members in jail, the board reluctantly admitted a total of 17 students to three high schools and three middle schools.

Before the black students could attend a class, then-Gov. J. Lindsay Almond Jr. ordered those schools closed, along with one school in Front Royal and two in Charlottesville. The Norfolk schools remained closed for five months until pressure from the courts and the community forced Almond to surrender.

Much of the Chrysler exhibit focuses on the struggles of the Norfolk 17 -- who included children as young as 12 -- to break the color barrier in Norfolk. One photo shows a young boy staring out the window of the federal courthouse after the School Board initially rejected his application to attend a white school. A profile of Hoffman notes that after he ruled against the Norfolk schools, longtime friends deserted him, and someone burned a cross on his front lawn.

The exhibit presents the collapse of Massive Resistance in 1959 as a victory with practical limits. By the mid-1960s, only 101 of the 12,927 students in Norfolk's integrated schools were black. It would take cross-town busing in the 1970s to change that balance.
Contact Bill Geroux at (757) 498-2820 or .