Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 25, 1993 TAG: 9304250055
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Just a year ago, there was hardly any written history of black Roanoke.
Now Melissa Prunty, curator at the Harrison Museum of African American Culture, is staggering under 1,700 pages - yes, 1,700 pages - of oral history interviews.
It will take a long, long time to digest, but she and others are pondering the community strength and resourcefulness that runs clearly through 60 recorded talks with elderly black men and women.
For instance, a surprisingly high number of black Roanokers went to college or professional schools and became homeowners, according to Prunty and her collaborator, Michael Cooke, a University of South Carolina history professor.
"They weren't barefoot people living in shacks," Prunty said.
There also was a strong black working class - and later, a strong middle class - because many black Roanokers worked for the Norfolk and Western Railway.
Few turned radical during the civil rights era. "Why would they riot? Why fight?" Prunty said after a forum Friday night on the museum's oral history project. "Black people here were doing everything" - running their own lifesaving crew, their own hospital, their own pharmacies, their own library.
This is not to say that black life in Roanoke was a piece of cake.
The indignities and threats to black life during much of this century poured forth in the interviews, conducted from May to December.
Dr. I.D. Burrell, a black physician and druggist who hoped to start a black hospital here, died around 1914 after white hospitals refused to treat his illness and he tried to make it by train to a hospital in Washington, D.C. Burrell Memorial Hospital, once a regional black hospital in Roanoke, was named for him.
In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan pestered a black house painter until his neighbors, armed with pistols and shotguns, waited with him one night. The Klansmen opened the front door to find an armed garrison sitting in the living room. The KKK took off.
Retired teacher Veron Holland remembers her mother telling her about how the KKK knocked on the man's windows for weeks - "He couldn't get any rest" - and how they rode to the man's house, with a KKK cross adorning the top of their limousine.
When a black minister moved into a white neighborhood in the late 1950s, a white "Welcome Wagon" volunteer knocked at his door. Stunned to see the new homeowners were black, the volunteer departed, muttering, "We brought some things from the Welcome Wagon, but we didn't know you were colored."
There were at least two "Rosa Parks" in Roanoke - two black women, one pregnant, who defied segregated seating on city buses.
Blacks were allowed to go to the popular Lakeside amusement park in Salem only for a brief period after Labor Day. Some people recall it was just for one day; some say two or three days.
Black mothers rolled their baby carriages in front of garbage trucks to force closure of the city's dump at Washington Park on Orange Avenue more than 30 years ago. The huge dump sparked methane fires, drew rats and could be smelled all over black neighborhoods.
"This is the first true grass-roots political action of black people in Roanoke," said George Heller, an activist in the Gainsboro neighborhood.
But there was little more of that.
Two-thirds of the people interviewed said race relations in Roanoke are satisfactory or "very good."
But some people say that police and security guards now are unfairly targeting black people. "Race relations right now in the city are worse off than they were in the '50s, '60s or '70s," civic leader Audrey Wheaton said at the forum.
People said that blacks and whites worked well together years ago to keep the racial peace. A biracial committee in the 1960s eased integration into downtown businesses, block by block, lunch counter by lunch counter.
As a girl, Georgia Reeves, a retired Patrick Henry High School teacher, was one of the young people chosen to integrate movie theaters and luncheonettes. Black children and their parents also were carefully selected to integrate schools.
The controls were wise, Reeves said. "If it had been a mass thing, we could have had problems."
She is thankful desegregation went smoothly. "We didn't have to get dogs sicked on us," she said. "It saved a lot of grief.
"The ministers delivered sermons on harmony in those days," she said.
Sometimes, whites gave her a helping hand. Bosses at the old American Viscose plant in Southeast Roanoke made sure she got a cleaning job every summer to help her through college. She still thanks them when she sees them on the street.
"Segregation was something that we accepted. It was a way of life. We had everything that we needed and could afford on this side," she said, speaking of black neighborhoods north of the railroad tracks. "We had our own friends and we were happy, or I was."
The Harrison Museum staffers, Virginia Tech students and volunteers working on the history project are re-creating, at least on paper, a cohesive black Roanoke community that is less united today.
"It is a shadow of what it once was," said Cooke, the University of South Carolina history professor. "I'm not trying to venerate the good old days, but there really was a different kind of Roanoke."
Black teachers spent their summers stitching cloth covers on the worn-out textbooks relegated to black schools. They and black truant officers - often living near their students - kept the dropout rate low and hauled parents into court if they let their children stray.
People told researchers about how they could nap undisturbed on front porches, how they could leave their doors unlocked and never think a thing about it.
"They could count on their neighbors to correct their children when they were not behaving as they should," Cooke said. "People made it a habit to know each other."
Now, he said, "We don't know each other."
Memo: ***CORRECTION***