Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 18, 1993 TAG: 9304180113
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
`IT'S TIME TO BE CONCERNED'
The Jubal Early Highway runs smack into the Booker T. Washington Highway at a rural crossroads called Burnt Chimney.What's gone on in Franklin County lately is like the convergence of those symbolic roads.
Under media glare, a mostly white, rural county that named one road for Early, a native-born Confederate general, has run head-on into the resentments of black citizens, whose strivings reach back to Washington, the black native son who became a national educator.
Franklin County has been forced into a racial soul-searching.
It began in February when a white math teacher at Franklin County High School was accused of using the word "nigger" and advising white girls against interracial dating. The teacher, Lari Scruggs, denies saying the offensive word.
One of the girls told Nadine Keen, a black English teacher, about the conversation, and Keen went to school administrators. When she thought they were unresponsive, she told black parents and the news media, and Franklin County High's racial tensions made the news many days in March.
Now the county's racial self-examination has moved beyond the disputed incident.
School officials have welcomed a U.S. Justice Department mediator to sort through reports of all kinds of discrimination - in jobs, housing, schools and the criminal justice system.
"Just everything, as far as life in general," Linda White said. Galvanized by the school incident and by discussions of other racial slights, White has resurrected the county's branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and serves as president.
The fuss grieves many people, mostly white, but some blacks, too. To them, it's a slap in the face after years of the Roanoke news media associating them with moonshine, speedways and the redneck way of life.
Powerful white people say race relations are fine - or no worse than other rural counties.
"Blown out of proportion" is a phrase they employ about how the newspaper and TV stations covered the school incident. Alleged incident, they emphasize.
The controversy has given the wrong impression, said an affluent white woman, demanding anonymity. "I know we have some real problems here," she said, "but there's a real sweetness here between people because we live together."
Blacks and whites worked "shoulder to shoulder" through the Civil War, said Dr. Francis Amos, a county historian and physician. "Race relations have been harmonious here for many, many years, and we're very proud of that."
But black people give anecdotal evidence that life in Franklin County does not favor them.
They talk off the record about how prominent whites use the word "nigger" in semi-public meetings. "When we have this kind of racism in our professional community, it's time to be concerned," one man said.
They are relieved that the federal mediator has come to hear what it's like to be the black 11 percent of a county where the Ku Klux Klan once ran rampant, where black per-capita income is 37 percent less than for whites, where many blacks still must commute to good jobs outside the county, where there is still no public swimming pool for black children to learn how to swim.
The same could be said for many other rural counties across America. And it holds especially true for Virginia's Southside counties, lined up near the North Carolina line.
But Franklin County has a chance now to learn how its black citizens live. It's an examination that would not have occurred if not for the reaction to that classroom conversation - real or alleged - between a teacher and two students last winter.
`It's like a sore'
Tim Witcher, 19, was an honors student, star football player and student leader at Franklin County High before he got his diploma last spring. He is black.
He had few racial troubles, except for when he claimed prom-party pizza tickets he'd won for good grades. After waiting in an otherwise white line, a white woman handing out the coupons didn't believe he was an honors student. "That kind of hurt my feelings," Witcher said, "but I got over it."
Witcher was one of the few black students in advanced classes at the high school - and just about the only one in student government. "That's a big problem - the separation of students," he said. "They need to come together to converse."
Now he's a freshman at the College of William and Mary. He was sorry to hear about racial divisions back home.
"It's not as bad as people say it is," he said of tensions at the high school, "but some people deny that there's any problem at all. It's like a sore - you can't hide it under a Band-Aid. You have to expose it to air so it will heal."
A white teammate of Witcher's grew up in a remote corner of neighboring Henry County. Witcher said the young man never saw a black person until he was in the fourth grade.
The diverse geography of Franklin County - it's the seventh-largest in the state - makes for clumsy generalizations. There are mountain hollows, tiny flatland villages, and a whole lot in-between.
"It depends on where you go," Ferrum College English professor Marcia Horn said of race relations. "I see a lot of politeness, people saying hello to each other." But, she said, "I hear of the `n-word' being used, and that hurts."
Two geographic regions - the Piedmont and the Appalachian mountains and valley - collide in Franklin County.
Its sandy, flat eastern and southeastern sections - dotted still by old tobacco sheds - were home to English settlers, their tobacco farms and their slaves brought west from Tidewater plantations to make Southside Virginia one of the state's richest tobacco-growing regions. It is Western Virginia's chunk of the Old South.
Many of the county's oldest black families have the same names as white slaveholders - Craghead, Holland, Powell, Hale.
And most of the county's black population still lives in the eastern part of the county, around Union Hall, and in its center, around Rocky Mount.
The county's western mountains are home to descendants of Scots-Irish settlers. Slavery was confined to the fertile creek valleys there.
In the north, around the Roanoke County line, the anti-slavery German Baptists farmed their fields pretty much by themselves.
In recent decades, in Franklin County's northeast corner, the fingers of man-made Smith Mountain Lake and its more affluent, often non-native residents reached into the county. "We're almost all lily-white and that's it," lake dweller Chuck Hoover said. He seldom sees black people.
"Depending on which area of the county you live in, you get a different perspective," said Robin Neamo-Parker, a black Roanoke history teacher who grew up in the county. "Some parts are said to be racist, so there are certain parts of the county I've never been in."
Counties like Franklin - without an interstate, major university or large industries - don't get regular infusions of new ideas, said the Rev. Charles Green, the Roanoke NAACP president. Except for the lake, he said, "You're not going to get many people from the outside."
This spring wasn't the first time Franklin County made racial news.
Three years ago, the county removed basketball goals at a park in Sontag after players, many of them black, were accused of abusive language and bringing portable stereos and alcohol to pickup games. Now the county removes the hoops on Friday afternoon and puts them back up Monday morning.
Two years ago, David Fleming Montgomery pleaded guilty to setting fire twice to a Penhook house to frighten off a black family who wanted to buy it. John Clifford Simms, who lived nearby, pleaded guilty to hiring the arsonist.
Recently, black and white county residents have criticized Brookside Swim Club in Rocky Mount for having no black members. Judy Hudson, the club's board chairwoman, said last week that club by-laws don't bar blacks even though there are no black members. She said she and other members have had black guests at pool parties.
State police are investigating why a Rocky Mount police officer sprayed Mace in the face of a handicapped black motorist from Rocky Mount as he was being arrested on a civil charge last month.
Census figures also show economic disparities between the races.
In 1990, white per-capita income in the county was $12,464. Blacks, at $7,931, earned $4,533 - 37 percent - less than whites. Unusually high white incomes around the lake may inflate the white figure, but the gap is indisputable.
Black leaders say it's taken years for blacks to begin to get good jobs in the county. Many still commute to Roanoke or Martinsville.
"There are simply more jobs" for blacks outside the county, said Russ Merritt, executive director of the Franklin County Chamber of Commerce.
Franklin County has not meant to stifle black careers in the three years he's been there, Merritt said. "It may have been different in the past, but in employment practices, I have not seen discrimination in hiring or promotion."
When federal mediator Frank Tyler was in town last week, a black woman reportedly told him that she has been seeking a bank job in the county for 20 years.
Green, the NAACP president in Roanoke, says he got a call from a black man who has worked 10- to 12-hour days at a Boones Mill business for years and been paid illegally out of pocket - no Social Security, no benefits. The man wanted to press for his rights, but he never called Green back. "I guess he got frightened," Green said.
`Caught in the middle'
The Ku Klux Klan was active in Franklin County until the 1960s. It was active as well in all the other tobacco-rich Southside counties, Halifax to Patrick.
For years, the KKK held rallies near Hales Ford, close to where Booker T. Washington was born and near the national monument and park that honor him.
The Klan protested when Virginia 122 was named for Washington in the 1950s. Ferrum College history Professor Dan Woods, who grew up in adjacent Roanoke County, heard it was the KKK that kept smearing black paint on new highway signs.
Sometime around then, the Klan threatened to burn down the Franklin News-Post office in Rocky Mount after the newspaper ran a story on Klan cross-burnings under the headline "Kowardly Killers Konvene."
The KKK's nemesis, the NAACP, has had a rocky history in Franklin County.
The county branch has born and died at least three times in the past 20 years.
Andrew Baskin was a history teacher at Ferrum College when he revived the NAACP and became its president from 1978 to 1981. He came to Ferrum when he was 22, fresh out of Berea College in Kentucky.
"There was the white community on one hand and there were different factions in the black community," he said, including political competition among black families. "I was caught in the middle."
Baskin and his wife, a Franklin County High teacher, looked at a house in a then-all-white subdivision in Rocky Mount. An anonymous caller told them that residents didn't want them. The house was taken off the open market, and Baskin wrote an angry letter to the News-Post telling county people that he didn't want the house, but that, if he did, they wouldn't have kept him away.
Baskin said some blacks opposed the NAACP's successful push for a black history course at Franklin County High in 1978. "They felt that you had to integrate everything into American history," he said, and not separate blacks' history from everyone else's.
The NAACP also pressed the county to file its first affirmative action plan - another racial breakthrough, he said.
Baskin left Franklin County 10 years ago, tired, he says, from his years as NAACP president. "For three years I had fought the white establishment . . . I had fought the black community. Any idealism I had when I came to Ferrum was destroyed."
Robin Neamo-Parker, 36, was one of Baskin's students at Ferrum. She is Franklin County through-and-through, and proud of it. She is black.
During segregation, she went to all-black Booker T. Washington Elementary, a building that is now part of the park honoring the black educator.
She graduated from Franklin County High School in 1974, got a two-year degree from Ferrum College, then earned her bachelor's at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In 1978, she came home to teach the first black history course at her old high school - one of the first schools in this part of Virginia to offer it.
Black students and parents saw their influence grow. The NAACP had a youth club at the high school. When they objected to the all-white cheerleading squad, two black girls were added.
Now, Neamo-Parker, who teaches American history and African-American culture at Roanoke's Patrick Henry High School, hears from young black acquaintances that they no longer feel comfortable at Franklin County High.
This puzzles her. "When all this came out, it really surprised me, because back in '78, when most other schools didn't offer black history, they did."
In the past few years, the county school system and Ferrum College have tried to raise racial consciousness.
Ferrum built a multicultural education program and teamed up with black ministers to attract more black students. Anand Dyal-Chand, Ferrum's vice president for student affairs, is distressed about reports of racial strife in the county and wants to help bring people together.
Napoleon Peoples, a Virginia Commonwealth University psychologist, trained Benjamin Franklin Middle School students in racial sensitivity a few years ago. Now the county has hired him to do it for the whole school system. That should begin next school year.
Marcia Horn, mother of a Franklin County High sophomore, wrote Principal Benny Gibson last month and asked him to open discussions of racial problems. Her son, Michael, told her tensions are high and that too few black students are in advanced classes or student government.
The school must face its troubles, Horn said. "There is a lot of acknowledgment that needs to be done," she said, "rather than denial."
Last month, Gibson said, a white girl was injured in a classroom after she called a black student a "nigger" and he shoved a desk at her.
`They work together'
A white businesswoman in her 30s finds herself awash in the county's racial stew.
Her grandfather fought opposition from white church members when he sold land to a black man. She was reared to be fair-minded, and she forbids white employees to use the "n-word" on her premises.
But the woman, who asked not to be named, contends that some people in the county - black and white - are pulling the races apart out of their own prejudices and power agendas.
"I think 95 percent of the people in this county get along excellent," she said, "There are many, many good white people, and there are many, many good black people. Black people and white people are friends. They work together. They go to church together."
Some are growing closer than that.
Black and white teen-agers are falling in love, and it's not sitting well with people of either race. Disapproving kids call white girls who date black guys "wiggers," the businesswoman said.
Two parents interviewed for this story spoke of white girls whose families sent them out of the county for dating black boys.
A father said that white students steeped in racism at home are confused. "They're associating with black students and aren't finding all the faults they've been told about," he said.
The white businesswoman was looking at her mid-1970s Franklin County High annual the other day - at the friendly notes black classmates wrote. There was all the reason then to believe that racial uneasiness would fade away.
But it has not, she said. "I really think the problem is worse now than when we integrated our school." That was in 1965.
Deborah and Marlon Burwell have been surprised at their racial treatment in Franklin County.
They have 10 children - six of their own, and four foster children. They live in a mountain hollow at Hardy.
Deborah Burwell is white; Marlon Burwell is black. Their children are black, white and bi-racial.
Their neighbors are friendly, but not the people Deborah Burwell sees around the county. "I have been accosted in the stores," she said. "The children have been called everything from zebras to monkeys."
Her children are the only blacks on their school bus. She said a white teen-ager told her kids that he and his father were in the Ku Klux Klan and were going to burn a cross in their yard.
She said her 7-year-old daughter Ebony is regularly assaulted on the bus by a white teen-ager.
Her white foster kids catch it, too. Susan, who's 10, said a white boy told her recently, "At least I don't live with no African booty-scratching black niggers."
"Well," Susan said, "I punched him in the face."
Marlon Burwell has lived in Franklin County most of his life. He bought land and moved back from Roanoke almost two years ago.
"I moved the kids over here, thinking I'm getting them away from the violence and stuff, and it was all rednecks," he said.
"I'm not sure if we did them a favor or not," his wife said. "I had a bus driver call my children `nigger.' I'm ready to pack up and move."
The Franklin County School Board is scheduled to hear comments about recent events from black parents and the local branch of the NAACP at a 9:30 a.m. meeting Monday at Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Rocky Mount.
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