THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, March 30, 1995 TAG: 9503300001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 49 lines
Simply saying that Virginia ought not to close public schools to avoid court-ordered racial integration was enough to alienate friends who thought otherwise in the late 1950s.
In Norfolk, Charlottesville and Warren County, the commonwealth locked students out rather than obey federal-court orders. With the closing of a half-dozen junior and senior high schools in Norfolk in 1958, thousands of the city's children were without formal education for several months in 1958-59.
That apparently was OK with 60 percent of Norfolk residents who registered approval of the closings in a citywide referendum. The Norfolk School Board, the superintendent of schools and public-school teachers publicly spoke out against the shutdowns. But only a tiny minority of city residents championed their reopening. That stance demanded courage. Pediatrician Forrest P. White, age 74 at his death this week, met the test.
Dr. White was president of the small Norfolk Committee for Public Schools. Resistance to integrated schools by Virginia's whites was as passionate as it was implacable. Anyone - white or black - who openly favored racial integration or expressed willingness to go along with desegregation was subjected to scorn, ostracism, epithets, vandalism, threats.
But the Norfolk Committee for Public Schools persevered, filing a lawsuit to force the schools to reopen. That lawsuit, along with litigation by black parents seeking to enroll their children in then- all-white schools, breached Virginia's legal defenses.
All the while, Dr. White was caring for - as well as about - children, as he did for decades. He was a leader regionally in promoting the health and safety of the young as he healed their ills and tended their wounds. Intelligent and articulate, he published widely in professional journals, newspapers, magazines. A lecturer at Eastern Virginia Medical School, where he was a professor of clinical pediatrics, he was at various times chief of pediatrics at Norfolk General Hospital and chief of the professional staff at Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters.
Dr. White was a lifelong resident of Norfolk. As physician and citizen, he quietly and steadily improved the lives of many. ILLUSTRATION: DR. WHITE
by CNB