Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 10, 1994 TAG: 9408100041
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By MELISSA DeVAUGHN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
When he was 17 years old, Phillip Price and his younger sister, Anna Christine, received a letter in the mail. It was from the Montgomery County School Board.
The letter informed Phillip and Anna Christine they were two of three black students hand-picked to attend white high schools in 1962. Although an official desegregation plan was not approved in Montgomery County until September 1965, the move was an effort to expedite integration in the county.
"My mother and father always pushed education on us," says the 48-year-old chaplain from his home in Blacksburg. "But my mother remembered us not wanting to go . We kept hoping [the school board members] would change their minds and pick somebody else."
But the plans didn't change, and rather than take the long bus ride to the all-black Christiansburg Institute, Phillip and his sister began walking the two blocks from their home on Roanoke Street to the high school - now Blacksburg Middle School. They were the only two black students in a school of more than 900 students.
The transfer was the result of a meeting between Montgomery County's superintendent, E.L. King, and the Pupil Placement Board, a state agency historians say was created to slow the process of integration.
In August 1962, King and Blacksburg High School Principal Curtis Gray met with the Richmond board and persuaded its members to assign the Price siblings to the high school. A third black student would attend Christiansburg High School. It was an unprecedented move for the county, one of which Curtis Gray is proud.
"It should have been done a long time ago," he said in an interview last Friday. "I felt integration could have happened sooner - a lot of people felt that way. But we did the best we could."
As Phillip Price recalls, his move to Blacksburg High School was the beginning of a new way of life for blacks and whites.
He was scared and didn't know what to expect of the other students. He didn't know what they would expect of him.
"The pressure was mostly put on by what was going on around us at the time," he said. "There were outside pressures that I felt more than local pressures."
At the time Price began attending Blacksburg High School, he remembers racial disputes from as far away as Alabama and Mississippi to as close to home as Carroll County.
"But a lot of students befriended me. Sure, there was the racial slur every now and then, but overall the flavor of the town was very understanding and very positive."
There were no public incidents. The primary pressure Price recalls was isolation. He was the only black student in his classes, and although his sister attended the school, she was only in eighth grade and he saw her just a few times a day.
"We'd walk to school together, eat lunch, then walk home together," he said.
"Phillip was always well-mannered and respectful. We never had any problems with him whatsoever," said Gray. "We had all kinds of students - all nationalities and backgrounds - with the university. We never had any bad feelings that I know of, and I credit the citizens of this community for that. I'm sure there were some who didn't like [integration] but all students would be treated fairly, and that's what we did."
Gray said the main concern of educators at the time was simply not to make a big deal out of integration. "Of course there were stereotypes that were ingrained in people as they grew up - I'd be willing to talk to them, but we protected equality. If a student didn't accept being in a class with a black student, then that student would have to leave. We wouldn't tolerate it and wanted fairness."
After making it through the school year, Price still needed a few classes to graduate with the class of 1963. Since he wanted to graduate in time to enter the Air Force in September, he took summer school classes, and fulfilled his requirements in July. Price was 19 years old.
Price was in the Air Force for almost 20 years, serving during the Vietnam War although he was never stationed there. He met his wife, Carrie, while in the Air Force. The couple had two children, a son and a daughter.
While Price planned to make the military his career, working in the Air Force pharmacy, he also felt a personal call to religion. He began taking courses through the International Bible College in San Antonio, Texas, and soon became an ordained minister. Later, after leaving the Air Force, he went to Colorado Christian University and the Denver Seminary to become a chaplain.
"I wanted to be more effective as a minister," Price said. "A chaplain learns to be more in touch with feelings and learns to empathize with patients - it's much more people-oriented." He obtained that goal in 1980 and began offering private counseling while living in Colorado.
Price knows now that his transfer to Blacksburg High School was a significant learning experience in his life. The move gave him courage and strength to fight future battles.
At 37, Price was taking prescription medicine to combat gout when he had a severe reaction to the pills. He had a high fever and broke out in blisters from the top of his head to the bottoms of his feet.
The doctors at the hospital in Texas, where he was living at the time, had to treat him like a burn patient. He recovered from the burns, but was left with scarring under his eyelids that affected both corneas. Efforts to restore Price's vision failed and eventually he went blind.
"I didn't realize then how important it was for me to go to Blacksburg High School," Price said. "I looked at it as a challenge and succeeded." He now regards his blindness as a challenge, too.
"It was like walking in the dark then, and I'm walking in the dark now. Both [events] have helped me in the rest of my life."
Two years after he went blind, Price left the Air Force to concentrate on his chaplaincy. Ten years later, he made another big change in his life. In 1992, he talked his wife into coming back to Blacksburg.
Despite missing his two grown children and two grandchildren in Colorado Springs, Colo., Price feels a special attachment to Blacksburg.
"I just wanted to come back home - there was a void that needed to be filled," he said.
He returned to "see my brothers and sisters and spend time with my mother. She still lives in the same house I grew up in."
Price also is taking graduate courses at Virginia Tech to fulfill requirements to become a licensed professional counselor. He would like to use what he has learned to help black children learn about their heritage, either as a school counselor or as a minister at a Christian Fellowship he and his wife plan to open in October.
"There seems to be so much distracting this generation from getting into education like they should," he said. "I would like to see a program that encourages black children to look at the importance of education. There's got to be a way to reach them. Maybe they don't know how far we've come. One of the cures to the problem is to bring about awareness and it's up to us to do it."
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB