Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, August 24, 1993 TAG: 9308240128
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DONALD BAKER THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: AMELIA LENGTH: Long
A generation later, almost all of those schools have admitted some black students, mostly in token force, if for no other reason than to allow their supporters to take tax deductions for the contributions that keep the schools afloat.
Not so with Amelia Academy, 35 miles southwest of Richmond. Amelia County is bordered on the north by the Appomattox River, the physical and psychological boundary of Southside Virginia, where racist sympathies - and the black population - historically were the highest in the state.
Even neighboring Prince Edward County, which closed its public schools for four years in the early 1960s rather than integrate them, has an integrated private academy.
The lack of integration at Amelia Academy recently embarrassed some politicians who attended the Amelia Beef Festival, an annual benefit for the all-white school.
Republican gubernatorial candidate George Allen and his running mate for lieutenant governor, Michael Farris, said they were unaware that the school had never enrolled a black student.
They were in good company.
"I didn't know it was still all-white," said Gov. Douglas Wilder. "I'd like to think it's more the breach than the observance."
Wilder, who has never attended the beef festival, believes the academy is "an anachronism. The vast majority of the people in Virginia want to move ahead. That's why I think [Allen's visit] made a lot of news."
The presence of even one segregated school in the Old Dominion "is not good for the state in terms of business opportunities," Wilder said. "People in business don't have time to waste arguing social problems. They need to do the best they can to make a profit, and this detracts from that."
Michael Salster, editor of the Amelia Bulletin Monitor and a critic of the academy, agrees with Wilder that the all-white school gives the county a bad image. His wife, Ann B. Salster, founded the weekly newspaper two decades ago to promote public schools.
Salster called the academy "our dirty little secret, passed down from generation to generation."
Macon Booker, the only black member of the Amelia County Board of Supervisors, said that "it's a shame such things still go on in this country," but added that "the academy is slowly dying. When the kids get big enough to think for themselves, they leave" and transfer to public schools.
Enrollment trends at the private academy and the county's public schools support Booker's contention.
At the height of its popularity, shortly after the dissolution of dual public school systems in Amelia County in 1969, the academy attracted up to 450 students. This fall, it will be fortunate to have 100 full-time students from preschool through high school, and only a few will be 12th-graders.
Meanwhile, enrollment in Amelia's public schools will top 1,700 next month, up by 200 during the last four years. About 60 percent of the public school students are white, which approximates the 2-to-1 ratio of whites to blacks in the county of 8,700 residents.
When the public schools were first integrated, the reverse was true: About 65 percent of their students were black.
School Superintendent Charles F. "Bucky" Shell said the change is the result of an influx of white residents who are not caught up in the past and a generation of academy graduates who are choosing public schools for their own children.
"Everybody knows the public schools are better" than the academy, said one woman who attended the academy in the 1970s but sends her children to public schools. "We just don't rub it in."
"In a small town," said lawyer Valentine W. Southall Jr., "if you start shunning people for political or social views, you'll live alone."
Southall, a supporter of the public schools, avoided the beef festival for his first two years as a member of the county School Board, but this year he attended with Del. Lewis Parker, a Democrat whose district includes an Amelia precinct.
Former Republican state senator Eva Scott, whose family helped found the academy, said she has "never seen people so mad in Amelia" because of news reports about politicians - including two local Democratic candidates - campaigning at the academy benefit.
"We even got contributions from Northern Virginia" as the result of a story in The Washington Post, Scott said.
"We have spent thousands of dollars on recruiting," Scott said.
"We have an open-door policy. We've made every effort" to attract blacks, including advertising a policy of nondiscrimination in local newspapers and telephoning parents of kindergarten students, inviting them to visit the school.
So why is Amelia still all-white when formerly segregated academies in Brunswick, Isle of Wight, Prince Edward, Nottoway, Powhatan, Southampton and Sussex counties have enrolled blacks?
"Any way you say this, it's not going to sound right, so I'm not going to say it," Scott said during an interview in her home.
Pressed for her view, she said, "I will speculate" that blacks believe the academy presents "an atmosphere in which they would not be welcome or comfortable."
"But they would be welcome. They would be well-treated. The difficulty would not come from those attending the school. We work together," she said. Pointing to a black domestic worker fixing lunch nearby, Scott said, "We're great friends."
Scott, whose five children attended the academy, said that "it would be to our advantage to have minority students. We'd get a tax break." Because Amelia has not enrolled any blacks, the Internal Revenue Service revoked the school's tax-exempt status, meaning its supporters can't deduct contributions from their federal income-tax reports.
Charles Goodman, president of the academy's board of directors and a member of the school's first graduating class, in 1970, concedes that blacks "must think they're not welcome, but they're wrong."
The academy "is not a breeding ground for racism," Goodman said, adding that both at home and at school his children are taught that "God is not a respecter of rich or poor, black or white."
Goodman said the academy adopted a Christian-based curriculum in the lower grades about 10 years ago because most parents wanted their children to be allowed to pray in class. Parents also chose the academy because they didn't want their children to take state-mandated sex-education classes and wanted teachers to have the authority to discipline pupils. Private schools in Virginia are not regulated by the state, although they must be accredited by one of several private associations.
Henry J. Featherston Jr., who is black and was principal of the integrated Amelia County High School from 1975 to 1991, said that "race still is the No. 1 reason for sticking to the academy."
In the early years, Featherston said, academy boosters had a "welcoming committee" that exaggerated discipline problems at public schools in hopes of attracting students.
As a result, Featherston said, some families sent their sons to public schools and their daughters to the academy, "assuming the girls would be harassed and molested" at the integrated school. But as those fears diminished, more and more parents opted for the county schools and their wider variety of courses.
Racial tensions are still a factor in day-to-day life. A current squabble involves sandlot baseball.
A merger of two youth baseball programs, affiliated with the Dixie Youth League, fell through this year because supporters of an integrated, county-sponsored league objected to joining an academy-sponsored league in which few blacks participate. The games would have been at the academy's field, which features an emblem that has the Confederate flag.
Once again, Michael Salster said, "the kids are suffering because the adults can't get together."
by CNB