If a highway marker ever goes up, the first sentence might be: “In 1964 Giles County became the first school division in Virginia to fully integrate its schools.”
As for the next sentence? Like so much of American history, this story of school desegregation — which celebrates its 60th anniversary here in 2024 — isn’t all black and white but is every shade of gray.
On its surface, the decision made in May 1964 by rural, conservative, white Giles County to close its Black schools and integrate its students is historic and seemingly bold and progressive — even though it came 10 years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down segregated schools in its landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling.
But according to research by Matt Gottleib, research assistant in the Virginia Department of Historic Resources’ Highway Marker Program, “It appears that Giles County just wanted to save some money.”
Maintaining the separate Bluff City schools for its small Black population was costly, Gottleib said. The answer: shutter the Black schools and — in what ended up receiving far more headlines in newspapers and federal court briefs — dismiss Bluff City’s six Black teachers and principal.
Declared the Suffolk News-Herald on June 18, 1964:
“A plan to completely integrate the public school system of Giles County has paradoxically brought charges of racial discrimination against county officials, ‘This is an outright case of discrimination against us teachers,’ said Laurence H. Leftwich, principal of the two Negro schools. He and six other Negro teachers have been notified their jobs are being terminated. Leftwich said the teachers felt they ‘got a raw deal. They didn’t even notify us the schools were going to be integrated. We had to learn it in the newspapers,’ he said. ‘The parents and other Negro citizens in the area didn’t know integration would mean closing the schools,’ Leftwich said. “Now they won’t have anywhere to go for recreation or to hold meetings and cultural affairs.’”
The following month, the Kansas City Call reported:
“Giles county school superintendent P.E. Ahalt announced that no Negro teachers would be rehired in the school system ‘in the foreseeable future, unless they are put there by the courts.’”
Which, indeed, is what happened. The Virginia Teachers Association, founded in 1887 to serve the commonwealth’s Black teachers, joined forces with the Virginia NAACP to fight Giles County and other jurisdictions in the state that had begun integrating Black students into schools while at the same time either canceling or failing to renew contracts of Black teachers.
The Afro-American newspaper wrote:
“The latest Dixie strategy is seen as an effort to deter colored pupils who might seek admission to formerly white schools, and as a punishment to the colored community for the bold youngsters who forge ahead. School officials also fear white reaction to having their children taught by colored persons, especially in rural areas. One must additionally remember that colored teachers, usually part of the social elite of the colored community, are quite often more qualified in their profession than their white counterparts. The rigidity of a segregated society has made it necessary that colored teachers seek degrees far beyond that which is required [of] their white counterparts in order to hold comparable posts. On any just scale, most of the colored teachers would be retained while some of their white counterparts may lose out.”
Like so many civil rights advances in the 1960s, justice came through the federal courts. In June 1965, U.S. District Judge Thomas Michie in Charlottesville ruled that Giles County had discriminated, noting, in part, that the new teachers that Giles County had hired following the dismissal of its Black teachers were all white.
However, Michie did not order the Black teachers to be reinstated; he only directed the Giles County School Board to offer them jobs as openings appeared.
On appeal, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in April 1966 reversed Michie’s ruling and ordered the teachers be reinstated. Chief Justice Clement Haynsworth wrote: “We don’t think the evidence supports the [District] Court’s finding that a complete evaluation of any kind was made … the record supports only the conclusion that the appellants were dismissed because of their race.”
According to the Giles County Historical Society: “At least one teacher was subsequently rehired, while the others found employment elsewhere. The case of Mary A. Franklin et al v. County School Board of Giles County and P. E. Ahalt, Division Superintendent of Schools of Giles County was cited in numerous cases over the next few years in both Virginia and other states forging new laws on employment discrimination.”
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Of course, the struggle for school desegregation was confined neither to Giles County nor Virginia nor even the South.
In an October 1964 article “School Bias Issues Plague North and South,” the Black newspaper Call and Post reported that New York and New Jersey parents picketed, while their children boycotted, school busing plans to achieve integration. Meanwhile Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who had unsuccessfully run for the Democratic nomination for president earlier in the year, “disclosed in Milwaukee that he would call the Alabama legislature into special session to draft an amendment to the U.S. Constitution assuring complete control by states over their public school systems.”
But Virginia had its own brand of integration challenges, symbolized by U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr.’s policy of Massive Resistance, adopted by state officials in 1956, that called for schools to be closed rather than integrated.
(In an ironic twist, Chief Justice Haynsworth, who ruled for Giles County’s Black teachers, was nominated by President Richard Nixon in 1969 to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the Senate rejected him 45-55 on charges that some of his court decisions had favored Massive Resistance and school segregation.)
Even the term “integration” is problematic to scholars like Brian Daugherity, professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University, whose research focuses on school desegregation and civil rights in Virginia. Were just Black students accepted into formerly all white schools, or did these schools also hire Black teachers and administrators? Were school facilities (cafeterias and bathrooms), athletic teams, clubs and transportation also integrated?
“What scholars like myself think of when we think of integration is a different standard than what newspapers and Giles County officials thought of in 1964,” Daugherity said.
Giles County may have been the first in the state to fully desegregate its schools, but it was hardly the first to start the process, nor the first to be considered “unitary,” or fully integrated.
Due to prompting by the federal courts, Norfolk and Arlington began desegregating some of their formerly all-white schools in 1959, Daugherity said, a trend that slowly spread over the next few years. But those systems’ Black schools remained open and 100% African American.
“African Americans had put a great deal of time and money and effort into maintaining African American schools during the period of Jim Crow,” Daugherity said. How school desegregation was typically implemented — closing Black schools and, with reluctance if not hostility, admitting Black students into previous whites-only school without any Black authority figures such as teachers, administrators or coaches — carried a new shackle of injustice.
“There was a cost of school desegregation that was borne largely by the African American community,” Daugherity said. “The fight for school integration is happening at the same time as the fight for employment rights and voting rights and general equality. There were successes and setbacks and losses. Full integration doesn’t occur in Virginia ’til the late 1960s, early ’70s.”
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For Barbara Johnson, Giles County’s integration came either too late or too soon. She was in her junior year at her all-Black Bluff City High School when talk of desegregation began to swirl.
“I didn’t want to do it because it was my last year,” Johnson said. She lived within walking distance of her tight-knit school where teachers were both caring and demanding. “It was a community.”
Her senior year at now-desegregated Giles High School “was just horrible because we were going into an environment of hostility. We lost all our teachers, so we were totally in a foreign land. I went through my senior year being called names. I was an emotional wreck having to ride the bus.”
She’d been in the band at Bluff City, but at Giles “I wasn’t interested in joining anything because I was wanting to get out.”
After high school Johnson went through a one-year vocational program to learn clerk stenography at what today is Radford University. She worked two years for the FBI in Washington, D.C., before returning to Giles County to work at Federal Mogul and, for most of her career, as an administrative assistant at Virginia Tech.
Now retired, the 76-year-old is an associate minister at her church studying for a master’s degree in theology.
Through the years, she got to see her sons thrive in Giles County public schools. They did well academically, participated in school teams and clubs, had friends both Black and white over to her house.
In 1964, she laments, “The culture wasn’t ready. They weren’t ready for us and we weren’t ready for them.”
As for the prospect of a highway marker commemorating Giles County’s unique place in Virginia’s history of school desegregation, Gottleib of the Department of Historic Resources said, “We were asked to come up with a wish list of Black history markers and this interested us. There are lots of markers, but nothing on full student desegregation. If someone were to sponsor it, it would be a wonderful addition.”
According to the department’s policy, “Staff will conduct additional research if necessary and will edit the text for accuracy, clarity, brevity, thoroughness, and educational value.”
Asked if Johnson had some proposed text for the marker, she chuckled and said, “It probably shouldn’t be put in the paper.”