ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, March 2, 1996 TAG: 9603060094
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ROBERT FREIS STAFF WRITER
THE REV. ARCHIE L. RICHMOND'S public humiliation became a catalyst for racial change and progress in Montgomery County.
In the days when even the most innocent event - a Sunday church picnic, for example - could turn ugly if the barrier separating black from white was violated, the Rev. Archie L. Richmond led his flock astray.
On the sultry afternoon of Aug. 22, 1955, Richmond refused to obey state law and leave the whites-only section of a public park. For that stand, the pastor of Blacksburg's St. Paul's AME Church was arrested, jailed and nearly fired from his job as head teacher at Friends Elementary School, Christiansburg's school for black children.
Soon thereafter, the white authorities decided not to make an example of him. They gave Richmond back his job and dropped the criminal charges.
But the incident wouldn't go away. Richmond's public humiliation became a catalyst for racial change and progress in Montgomery County, probably the most significant event in the history of desegregation here.
And it defined the content of Archie L. Richmond's character, shaping a career that led him to become the Boy Scouts of America's first African-American national executive.
"I look back with a great deal of pride," Richmond says today from his New Jersey home. "So many people thought I was getting ahead of my time. But if I had to do it, I'd do it all over again."
In 1952, when Richmond first came to Blacksburg as St. Paul's student minister, discriminatory Jim Crow laws dictated the racial protocol, as they had for generations. Even in the college town of Blacksburg, "If you wanted to get served, you had to go to the back door of the restaurant," he says.
After Richmond became St. Paul's full-time minister, the U.S. Supreme Court announced in 1954 that "separate but equal" racial facilities were unconstitutional.
"A lot of black people as well as whites had begun to analyze the system," Richmond recalls. "There were spontaneous types of experiences happening throughout the South."
Yet on the day of the fateful church picnic, Rosa Parks still rode in the back of Montgomery, Ala., buses. And Martin Luther King Jr. was a relatively unknown minister in the same city.
There was nothing premeditated or organized about what occurred at Carter Memorial Park, a small roadside facility in Wythe County, that Sunday. Richmond says he and about 50 members of the St. Paul's congregation - including women and children - went there for a church picnic, not to make history.
Like other state parks and public facilities, Carter Memorial Park was still segregated under Virginia law, despite the Supreme Court's ruling. At this site, the two areas were divided by a creek. Trash and bare patches of dirt littered the black-designated area, in dramatic contrast to the tidy section for whites.
Richmond surveyed the scene and made the profound decision not to cross the creek into the black section. "I said to my congregation, 'We aren't going.'" He reiterated that stance when confronted by a park attendant. "I just got tired of being pushed around," he says. "Tired of being tired."
That's when the summer afternoon began to get hot. Jackie Eaves was 8 years old and among the St. Paul's congregation that day. "We were standing around. I didn't know why we had to wait," she remembers.
Eaves, of Blacksburg, doesn't recall seeing the police come to arrest Richmond. "But I remember knowing at one point that he was gone."
Evidently, the park attendant telephoned for help with alarm in his voice, because news accounts say two Wythe County deputies and Commonwealth's Attorney Edwin Shaffer came to Carter Memorial Park.
"They told me, 'You have a choice of going or being arrested,'" Richmond says. "I said, 'We want to stay.'''
So they arrested him, put him in the squad car and drove off for the Wythe County jail, as his congregation watched. There was no scuffling. Richmond says he wasn't handcuffed or taunted by police.
At the Wytheville jail, they formally charged Richmond with violating segregation laws, set bond at $500 and left him alone in a hallway.
There, Richmond searched his soul. "I was sitting there thinking of all the things they did to make life miserable for black people. I felt resentment, not anger. I decided it was time to take a stand."
Released several hours later after members of St. Paul's arrived to post his bond, Richmond was to discover his troubles were only beginning.
News of his arrest made the local newspapers and reached the Montgomery County School Board's attention. Four days after the park incident, the board voted to suspend Richmond as head teacher of Friends Elementary School. A week later, the School Board's lawyer wrote the state attorney general to see if Richmond could be legally fired.
In response, Richmond traveled to the state capital and met with Oliver Hill, the state NAACP's lead attorney, a man who soon would earn his reputation fighting Virginia's Massive Resistance movement. After that meeting, Hill wrote a letter to S.T. Godbey, Montgomery County's superintendent of schools, threatening legal action if Richmond wasn't given his job back.
Richmond chuckles as he recalls Godbey's demeanor when they met privately to discuss the situation. "It terrified him. He knew I had a state lawyer behind me. He said, 'Mr. Richmond, you can go on back to work, because I don't want to see a lot of lawyers in my office.'"
Indeed, the School Board voted to reinstate Richmond. However, Richmond said Godbey tried to fire him again at the end of the school year, and would have done so if black parents hadn't mounted a petition drive in protest.
Richmond's arrest galvanized the black community. News accounts say a large crowd of supporters came to Wytheville on Sept. 27, 1955, to attend Richmond's trial for the park incident.
"I imagine that intimidated the people who were in the position to make legal decisions," Richmond says.
When Richmond's case was called, Commonwealth's Attorney Shaffer announced that the charges would be dropped, "in view of the fact that there has never been any trouble between the races in Wythe County."
Shaffer still works in the county commonwealth's attorney's office, now as an assistant prosecutor. Concerning the suggestion that his office was intimidated - or dropped the case to avoid adverse publicity or an appeal challenging segregated public facilities - Shaffer says, "That never happened."
"I don't think there's any question about the degree of change," he added, contrasting now and then.
Perhaps the most significant result of Richmond's arrest occurred as the incident became known among white Blacksburg residents, particularly those who were early proponents of desegregation.
Most influential was the Rev. Ellison Smyth, minister of Blacksburg Presbyterian Church. Smyth was a member of a prominent local family who didn't share traditional views on race. He befriended Richmond and invited the black pastor to join the local ministerial association.
Smyth and Richmond joined with other kindred spirits to form a local chapter of the Virginia Council on Human Relations, an organization dedicated to biracial cooperation and dialogue. Today, Smyth, now 92, says of Richmond, "We were like twins, almost."
Throughout the late 1950s, this group sought to wear down local racial barriers, despite its unpopular stance. "They were given the strength and the courage by Archie Richmond," says the Rev. R. Baldwin Lloyd of Blacksburg, who at the time was Virginia Tech's Episcopal campus minister.
Walter Lewis of Blacksburg recalls Richmond as a soft-spoken yet persuasive man who was at his best during personal, one-on-one dialogue. "He was the kind of man that could move people."
By all accounts, the tone Richmond set for the local Human Relations Council was quietly effective. Walls began to fall through negotiation, and the community avoided the tense and often violent racial confrontations that characterized the civil rights movement elsewhere.
The council still exists.
Back then, however, not everyone saw the light. Richmond found a formidable opponent in the community's most prominent man, Virginia Tech President Walter S. Newman.
Newman was a man of the old school. Smyth says Newman kicked the local American Association of University Women chapter off campus after Richmond's college-graduate wife, India, joined.
Smyth rankled Newman - an elder of the Blacksburg Presbyterian Church - by inviting the AAUW chapter to meet at his church instead. When Richmond asked to enroll his daughter in the church's day school, Smyth readily gave his approval.
On Jan. 8, 1961, when the church's governing body passed an anti-discrimination resolution, Newman cast the lone dissenting vote, and, Smyth says, dropped out of the church.
Smyth, Richmond and Lewis also worked to integrate the church's Boy Scout troop, and that effort led Richmond to a new career.
He left Blacksburg in 1963 and moved north, accepting a position at the Boy Scouts' national office. Eventually, Richmond became the first African-American to serve on the organization's national staff.
Now retired at age 63, Richmond lives in East Windsor, N.J., and serves as a district elder for the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Although the present course of race relations concerns Richmond, he regards his days in Blacksburg with satisfaction.
And of that day at Carter Memorial Park, he says: "It was a great event, a great step forward for black people, and white people, too."
LENGTH: Long : 174 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. There was nothing premeditated or organized aboutby CNBwhat occurred at Carter Memorial Park (right) in 1955 when a black
preacher and about 50 members of his congregation - including women
and children - went there for a church picnic. color GENE
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2. headshot of Rev. Archie L. Richmond
3. Jackie Eaves, who was 8 the day Richmond was arrested, still
attends St. Paul AME Church in Blacksburg (in background.) color
ALAN KIM/STAFF
4. Newspaper clippings (below) tell of the 1955 desegregation
incident.
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