THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, July 23, 1996 TAG: 9607230042
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EMILY PEASE, SPECIAL TO THE DAILY BREAK
LENGTH: 183 lines
QUIETLY, BEHIND the scenes, some of Williamsburg's most prominent figures have been talking about race: how race keeps people apart and makes people distrust one another. How race affects the way a person looks at things, like discipline in the schools, or neighborhood development, or headlines in the newspaper.
It was the headlines at the end of the O.J. Simpson trial last fall, in fact, that got people in Williamsburg talking.
First, Bill Bryant, a former editor of the Virginia Gazette, called Tony Conyers, director of human services for James City County.
Conyers called David Tetrault, assistant for lay ministries of Bruton Parish Church.
And then Bryant called his friend Lois Hornsby, who is the mother of pop music star Bruce and whose community work in Williamsburg is nearly legendary.
Then came David Norman, who was the county administrator, and John McCrimmon, director of the Community Action Agency. And finally, Ginny Hablett, who works on the staff at Bruton Parish.
They all had lunch at Wilma's, a favorite local meeting place, to talk - openly - about how the country was still divided by race. And Williamsburg was no exception.
At about the same time, another group had begun to meet for the same reason. Led at first by George Genakos, a Williamsburg City Council member, the group had gathered for breakfast and a frank discussion about issues that divided the community, including race.
Then the two groups combined, the breakfast crowd and the lunch crowd, and they began getting together to talk, over and over.
``When we came together, that was a real experience for us,'' Bryant says. ``It took us three months just to make sure we agreed on what we were doing.''
After much discussion, they emerged with a statement they could agree on.
``The crisis our generation faces encompasses a sense of division, separation, fear and distrust,'' they wrote. ``These unhealthy frustrations, which endanger our common future, must be challenged so that attitudes are positively altered.''
Their mission was more modest. They proposed to ``bring people together to share openly . . . similarities, differences, strengths and weaknesses.'' And the name they gave themselves was All Together.
Bryant, who is prone to grand phrases, contends that those early meetings were nothing less than a ``continuation of the revolution.'' Bridging racial gaps is revolutionary, Bryant maintains, and Williamsburg is ``the birthplace of our nation's revolution, the place where it all began. So it makes sense that this is where it should continue.''
At a glance, the Williamsburg area may not seem like fertile ground for a revolution. In fact, things look rosy enough to attract new residents by the thousands. James City County, where much of the recent development has taken place, increased in population from 22,763 in 1980 to 41,900 in 1995.
The average sale price of a home in the Williamsburg area is $161,167 - higher than in Northern Virginia, Charlottesville and Hampton Roads.
Still, in a city where history is the biggest industry, African-Americans have paid a high price for the Colonial charm that draws so many tourists and affluent new residents.
At the beginning of the Colonial restoration in the 1930s, Williamsburg was nearly 50 percent black. On a hill adjacent to the Colonial capitol, white students from Williamsburg attended Matthew Whaley School; a few blocks away, across the railroad tracks, black students from Williamsburg and James City County attended Bruton Heights School. Both schools' graduates went on to become teachers, doctors, ministers and professors.
Nationally, among schools for African-Americans, Bruton Heights was considered to be a model.
Children still attend Matthew Whaley, and the old school will undergo a $6 million renovation over the next two years, but Bruton Heights School is gone. Despite the protests of many of its graduates, it was purchased by Colonial Williamsburg, expanded and put to use as an education center.
Colonial Williamsburg has agreed to create a museum within the new building that will tell the story of Bruton Heights, but a museum can't take the place of the school itself.
Tony Conyers is so bitter about the loss of his alma mater that he couldn't drive near the old school for a long time without feeling angry.
``It's one of the most painful things that's happened to me in my life,'' he says. ``I'm not angry about it anymore, but I'm saddened by the fact that another generation won't have the marvelous experience I had there. I have a strong belief that one of the most important things in life is knowing who you are and where you come from. Much of our sense of self got nurtured in that institution.''
Bruton Heights School is not the only black institution in Williamsburg that has been lost. The Triangle, a commercial block that included businesses and a medical clinic patronized by African-Americans, was razed and redeveloped in 1980. Earlier, during the Colonial restoration, First Baptist Church, one of the first black Baptist churches in America, was bought and the building was torn down.
Although Colonial Williamsburg helped build a new, larger church just a few blocks away, only a marker remains on the site where the historic church once stood.
When the All Together group began talking, it had to confront these past hurts. It also had to confront the fact that Williamsburg is a community made up of the poor, who are disproportionately black, and the rich, who are mostly white.
This economic disparity was the biggest surprise that confronted David Norman when he moved to James City County nine years ago to become the county administrator. He discovered that he could drive from the carefully manicured streets of the Kingsmill area to unpaved roads in the county, where some families still manage without indoor plumbing.
``I had no idea the disparity was that pronounced,'' Norman says. ``There are just so many at the low end and so many at the high end.''
Another newcomer to Williamsburg, Jack Charlton, was also surprised by what he found. As a boy growing up in the Glenville section of Cleveland, where blacks rioted in the 1960s and then came together to improve conditions in the city, Charlton was accustomed to seeing people divide themselves along lines of race and class.
But Charlton thinks Williamsburg is different. When he moved here as a vice president of Mercedes Benz, he settled in Kingsmill, with its championship golf course and quiet, wooded streets. His wife, Audrey, found the neighborhood beautiful. However, the gates at the front entrance, and the beauty itself, make Charlton uncomfortable.
``We develop a feeling of eliteness,'' he says. ``All people care about is whether the streets are beautiful and whether the tennis courts are swept. They don't want to believe poverty exists here. It's a form of denial.''
Williamsburg, he contends, suffers from segregation - not forced segregation but a subtler variety.
``I came up under segregation,'' he says, ``but I could see it. Now, many of the problems we had then have just gone underground, and we don't see them. Separation is the first start of a bad situation to come into our community. There's really nothing we can do unless we sit down and talk.''
Charlton is willing to roll up his sleeves and work to improve the dialogue in Williamsburg, and he believes in All Together. Back in the spring, the group voted to name him chairperson pro tem. It's the only title the group was willing to give to anyone.
Since its first meetings, the group has held three larger forums for discussion.
The first, held in January, introduced invited participants to the idea of open dialogue. People began tentatively, but by the end of the evening, they had aired an array of feelings.
Bryant put them in a list. At the top, he quoted one of the participants anonymously: ``Camouflaged dialogue. . . . We need to speak what we really feel, starting here and now.''
After the second forum, Mike Sams, a teacher of government at Lafayette High School, said he was grateful for the opportunity to meet new people and talk openly with them.
``People from all walks of life and from different races were talking,'' he says. ``I don't think anybody pulled any punches, and I think people said what they thought. There was some tension, but that was good.''
In one forum, one white participant suggested that black high school students, especially males, sometimes make poor grades because doing well in school seems to be a ``white thing to do.'' Black participants responded with silence.
In another discussion, a black speaker complained that white developers were effectively running black families out of the area. And one participant observed that whites shop in one Food Lion in town, while blacks shop in another about two miles away. Her solution: ``We ought to try shopping at a different Food Lion.''
Not everybody in Williamsburg thinks that such talk is enough to bring about needed changes.
Jeanne Zeidler, Williamsburg vice mayor, looks at discussion as only the first step in a long process of bringing about change.
``I heard people say they never have someone of another race over for dinner, and there was some discussion about how we don't socialize with one another enough. But it doesn't matter to me who invites whom to dinner. We just need to figure out where we're going in this community and what we're going to do.''
Christy Matthews, who directs African-American interpretation at Colonial Williamsburg, would agree with Zeidler.
``I think the ones who should be talking at the All Together groups aren't there. They're the ones who feel left out in the community, the disaffected.''
However, Matthews contends that if any area can make a difference in improving race relations, it would be Williamsburg.
``There's a tremendous involvement of people in this community,'' she says. ``One thing I like about Williamsburg is, we aren't going to accept people coming in from the outside and telling us how to do things. We'll get it done in our way.''
If dialogue does work, it will become apparent this fall, when All Together envisions something like a whole month of discussions.
``We need to keep this thing going,'' Lois Hornsby says. ``Each time we've had one of our meetings, I find I go out and see things a little differently. It makes you more sensitive to other people, and that's really what we need.'' ILLUSTRATION: JOHN EARLE/The Virginian-Pilot
Color photo
CANDICE C. CUSIC/The Virginian-Pilot
``Separation is the first start of a bad situation to come into our
community,'' says Jack Charlton.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE RACE RELATIONS by CNB