Anne Rhodes Baltimore, an AfricanAmerican now in her 60s, trudged up a long hill to Warren County High School, which shut down in the late 1950s rather than admit black students. “Why did they go to all this trouble?“ she said in a choked voice. Baltimore would eventually be among a group of black students who desegregated the school. But her question is at the heart of “Locked Out,“ a documentary on the fall of Massive Resistance 50 years ago. It will air Monday at 9 p.m. on PBS stations WCVE and WHTJ.

City Council has apologized for Charlottesville’s role in Virginia’s Massive Resistance to school integration in the 1950s.

CHARLOTTESVILLE—The Charlottesville government is considering apologizing for its role in Massive Resistance, the failed attempt to keep Virginia public schools from becoming racially integrated despite the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. Assistant City Manager Maurice Jones, who is organizing the city’s dialogue on race that will kick off in December, wrote the resolution that praises the students who first integrated the city’s schools and describes the preceding school closures as “disgraceful.“ Council members expressed an interest in August in acknowledging the 50th anniversary of Massive Resistance’s end.

The Charlottesville government is considering apologizing for its role in Massive Resistance, the failed attempt to keep Virginia public schools segregated after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Nineteen teachers from Virginia spent last week studying and discussing Massive Resistance. Their assignment: Learn about Virginia’s organized struggle against integrating public schools by completing a case study on Prince Edward County’s role in Brown v. Board of Education as part of the E. Claiborne Robins Jr. Teachers Institute at the Virginia Historical Society.

A symposium yesterday at the state Capitol on the Massive Resistance era in Virginia highlighted the struggles of young students—and the heroes and villains in the struggle to integrate the state’s public schools in the 1950s and beyond. In his 1970 inaugural address, Gov. Linwood Holton declared that the policy of Massive Resistance—a concerted effort by the state and local governments to resist integration—was over. Holton later sent his children to public schools in Richmond.

Textbooks are nice, but nothing beats a history lesson that includes original documents, eyewitness accounts and participants, a group of Virginia teachers is finding out this week. The 19 educators from across the state are learning about Massive Resistance—Virginia’s attempt to keep from desegregating schools in the 1950s and 1960s—as participants in the annual weeklong E. Claiborne Robins Jr. Teachers Institute at the Virginia Historical Society.

The Student Experience: 9:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. today
  Politics and the Media: 11 a.m.
  Lasting Effects : 3:30 p.m.
  Keynote speech: 1:05 p.m. by former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder
  More info: The discussions at the state Capitol are free to the public, but seating is limited. For more details, visit http://www.centerforpolitics.org.

Sometimes the era seems ancient; sometimes it resembles yesterday. Fifty years ago Virginia had a rendezvous with destiny and came up wanting. It scorned human rights and the promise of the Declaration of Independence and instead took a course known as Massive Resistance. Tomorrow at the Capitol, the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics will convene a conference on the chapter and its legacy.

Fifty years have now passed since the dark days of Massive Resistance, when public schools in some Virginia localities were shuttered rather than integrated. Virginia has had an overall proud and constructive history; yet except for the original sin of slavery, Massive Resistance is the most indelible stain on the state’s soul. When today’s young people are told about the school closings, they are astonished. In retrospect it is almost unbelievable—even for those of us who lived through the era—to accept that public education ceased in order to prevent “the mixing of the races.“

Tomorrow the Virginia Historical Society kicks off its 16th annual E. Claiborne Robins Jr. Teachers Institute. Each year, a group of teachers from across the commonwealth gathers at the society for an in-depth exploration of some topic in Virginia and American History. This year’s topic is “The Brown Decision in Virginia.“ This year’s institute observes the 50th anniversary of two significant events in Virginia’s painful struggle to become a more just society—the enrollment of 21 black students in previously all-white schools in Norfolk and Arlington, and the decision of Prince Edward County’s Board of Supervisors to close public schools rather than integrate them.

Longtime Washington Times commentary editor Mary Lou Forbes, whose reporting on Virginia’s civil rights struggles won a Pulitzer Prize in 1959, has died. She was 83.

It’s graduation day for Norfolk’s “Lost Class of 1959.“

The defeat of the Massive Resistance movement in the late 1950s freed Virginia from a segregation-above-all mind-set that was turning it into a “backward state,“ Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said yesterday. The governor spoke at a luncheon in Norfolk honoring the 17 black Norfolk students who braved taunts and the threat of violence to be the first to integrate the city’s schools 50 years ago yesterday.

The defeat of the Massive Resistance movement in the late 1950s freed Virginia from a segregation-above-all mind-set that was turning it into a “backward state,“ Gov. Timothy M. Kaine said yesterday. The governor spoke at a luncheon in Norfolk honoring the 17 black Norfolk students who braved taunts and the threat of violence to be the first to integrate the city’s schools 50 years ago yesterday.