Segregation and Massive Resistance

The Class of 1969 began their public school education in a segregated school system. In the fall of 1957, the Black students were welcomed into the first grade at the Bruton Heights School for Black children.

Source: Bruton Heights School Yearbooks, courtesy Troy D. Roots

A few years earlier, in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court had issued a landmark ruling, Brown v. Board of Education Topeka, Kansas, that deemed segregation in public schools unconstitutional. However, in Virginia, as elsewhere, the white elite resisted integration. U.S. Senator and former governor, Harry F. Byrd Sr., led a movement for Massive Resistance that called on the State of Virginia to use all legal and political means to block school integration.

The Williamsburg City Council joined this movement. In 1955, the Williamsburg City Council "unanimously adopted a resolution to request State leaders "to do everything in their power legally possible" to continue the segregated school system."

In 1956, the Virginia General Assembly, under the leadership of Governor Stanley, passed a package of legislation supporting Massive Resistance to mandated desegregation, "as Confederate flags waved in the galleries" of the Capitol Building.

The Class of 1969 began their studies in Williamsburg's segregated school system the following year in the midst of Massive Resistance.

Source: The Virginia Gazette. June 24, 1955. "Williamsburg City Council Requests Continuance of School Segregation." Section 2, Page 9.

Massive Resistance ended in 1959. Yet, progress toward integration remained slow. By 1964, just 5 percent of Black students were studying at integrated schools in Virginia.

Indeed, the Williamsburg-James City County School Board had taken little action towards integration. While public school systems were closed in some parts of the state to avoid integration, Williamsburg-James City County adopted what teacher Ruth Pope describes as a "wait and see" approach that maintained the status quo of segregation.

Film Credit: Media Collections, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

Lafayette Jones, Jr.
Courtesy: WYDaily

In 1960, one Black high school junior, Lafayette Jones, defied this "wait and see" approach and asked to enroll in the white-only James Blair High School. The Daily Press reported Lafayette's recollections years later: soon after his request, "his father got a phone call. It was Rawls Byrd, the superintendent of Williamsburg-James City County Schools, making it clear that if Jones did not rescind his request, his father—a carpenter—would never find work in town again."

Superintendent Byrd also attended a faculty meeting at the Black Bruton Heights School and told the faculty that "if Jones kept trying to attend James Blair, he would shut down Bruton Heights and fire all the teachers.

“He made a lot of threats, and I think he would have made good on them,” Jones said.”

Lafayette Jones continued his education at the Black-only Bruton Heights School, graduating in 1961. Rawls Byrd said, that "no black kid would ever go to that school,” Lafayette Jones recalled. Integration was again delayed.

Sources: Centolanza, Brandy. 2017. With roots in America’s earliest free back settlement, resident retraces history with purpose. WYDaily, March 5.; McKinnon, Ryan. 2016. Former students and teachers want Rawls Byrd Elementary renamed. Daily Press. March 29.

By 1963, the School Board and its funding partners, the City of Williamsburg and James City County, continued to envision a future of segregation with plans to build a new high school for Black students: Berkeley High School.

Source: “Actual Enrollment as of March 30, 1963 and Estimated Enrollment for the School Years 1964-1965 and 1967-68,” The Stella Neiman Papers, William & Mary Special Collections Research Center, Accessible through The Lemon Project, https://lemonlab.wm.edu/items/show/35.

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Banner image: The Virginia Gazette. June 24, 1955. "Williamsburg City Council Requests Continuance of School Segregation." Section 2, Page 9.