Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 4, 1993 TAG: 9310040063
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BONNIE V. WINSTON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Long
By endorsing creation of a separate women's program to let Virginia Military Institute remain all-male, Gov. Douglas Wilder has done little more than follow in the segregationist footsteps of some of his predecessors, several black leaders charged last week.
"Here we go, fighting the same battles over and over," said Dr. William Ferguson Reid, a retired Richmond surgeon and former U.S. State Department medical director. "Instead of [former Govs.] Lindsay Almond or Mills Godwin making these decisions, we have Doug Wilder.
"We still don't have a governor who cares about these types of rights for people," added Reid, a longtime Wilder supporter who in the 1960s became the first black elected to the General Assembly since Reconstruction.
Until the late 1950s, Virginia governors fought to keep public schools segregated by race, even to the point of defying desegregation orders. With a few exceptions, they also kept blacks from attending state-supported colleges, except for the all-black Virginia State University near Petersburg.
On Sept. 25, Wilder approved the VMI Board of Visitors' proposal to preserve the military school's 154-year tradition of denying entry to women. In response to a federal court ruling that the school's admission policy is unconstitutional, the board plans to set up a "leadership" program for women at privately run Mary Baldwin College in Staunton.
To help start the institute, the all-women's school would receive $6.9 million from the VMI Foundation, the alumni group bankrolling the legal battle to keep VMI all-male. Mary Baldwin also would get an annual per-student supplement from the state equal to that provided for VMI students.
Under the plan, women enrolled in the Mary Baldwin institute would take ROTC courses plus "rigorous" physical training. But the women's program would not include VMI's "rat line" and "adversive" training.
While some VMI instructors may teach the women, institute graduates would receive degrees from Mary Baldwin.
At a news conference Sept. 25, and again during questioning Wednesday, Wilder insisted the plan is far different from the "separate-but-equal" racial segregation his predecessors fought to preserve.
"If it were construed as separate and equal, it would be a sham," the governor said. "VMI is continuing its same tradition and women are getting the same training, minus some components, at Mary Baldwin. In my judgment, this is not a denial to receive the same training."
Wilder has said he believes VMI should allow women.
In 1940, the General Assembly voted to pay for blacks to go out of state for most graduate education and some undergraduate programs rather than open all-white state schools to them.
The VMI proposal to educate women elsewhere "almost sounds like what [the state] was doing by sending blacks out of state," said Edgar A. Toppin, a research professor of American and African-American history at Virginia State.
The practice was stopped by the early 1960s, after several U.S. Supreme Court decisions struck down similar setups in other states. That was about the time the state also abandoned its "massive resistance" policy.
Wilder, 62, grew up in segregated Richmond. Repeatedly during his term, he has told how he went to Howard University Law School in Washington because he couldn't attend all-white, state-supported law schools in Virginia.
In Sweatt vs. Painter, a 1950 landmark case cited by civil rights attorneys, Texas hastily set up a law school for blacks to avoid desegregating the University of Texas Law School. The Supreme Court ruled that even if the new school were "equal" in terms of faculty, size of the student body and library facilities, its students would not enjoy the same "reputation of the faculty . . . influence of the alumni, standing in the community, traditions and prestige," as students of the white law school.
"It is not a huge leap to say there are similarities" between the Sweatt case and Virginia's proposed solution for VMI, said Dennis D. Parker, assistant counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. "When you look at the Brown decision, the court asked what was the message implied [by segregation] and the effect on black children. The message was that black students were inferior.
"I can see the same message here for female students - that they can't make it at VMI. The fact that other military academies are open to women and have women completing all of the program shows there is no legitimate interest being served" by excluding women from VMI.
James Farmer, former head of the Congress of Racial Equality and now a professor at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, said the VMI-Mary Baldwin plan seems "particularly irrational, given that women are in the military schools and fought in the Persian Gulf War."
"I can't understand it. I thought we were beyond that."
Jack W. Gravely, former president and executive secretary of the Virginia NAACP, said the proposal continues Virginia's "history of diverting people" rather than integrating schools.
"For anyone not to see that this is a cousin of racial integration, they'd have to be blind," Gravely said. "The only difference here is basically gender. I don't see how VMI can justify segregation of a public school. They are merely setting up a straw man in Mary Baldwin."
Answering questions last week, Wilder defended his position by noting that two women are among the VMI board members who came up with the plan. He also pointed out that some feminists have endorsed the idea of separate facilities for women, "which means there isn't this hue and cry I hear from anyone relative to this separate-but-equal argument."
Still, Reid said he was disenchanted by Wilder's use of "the same arguments" that once kept blacks out of Virginia schools. He recalled that his own medical school education at Howard was a result of Virginia's segregationist policies.
"These decisions [by the court] are not made for what the majority wants, but to protect the rights of the minority," Reid said.
Wilder "could have nipped this whole thing in the bud. But it looks like he's trying to straddle the fence and just accept what's given to him, so he won't take the blame," Reid said. "And he won't offend any conservative white support" he may need for a 1994 run for the U.S. Senate.
by CNB