THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, April 10, 1995 TAG: 9504100050
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MARY BETH JOACHIM, KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: FARMVILLE LENGTH: Medium: 94 lines
When Connie Rawlins, Vera Allen and Ernestine Herndon went to work on April 23, 1951, the three teachers could not have imagined how dramatically their lives would soon be altered.
By the end of that spring day 44 years ago, student protests at the all-black Robert R. Moton School would begin years of major upheaval in rural Prince Edward County. The controversy continues today.
The student walkout prompted lawsuits that would bring down segregation in the United States as part of the Brown v. Board of Education case.
In response to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown, Prince Edward closed its public schools for five years rather than integrate. The move shut many young people - blacks, and whites who couldn't pay for the private academy that replaced the school system - out of a formal education. It tore some families apart.
Now the community prepares to fight to save the Moton School from possible sale and demolition this summer. As fighters in both battles, Rawlins, Allen and Herndon spoke to students at Longwood College about the price the civil rights struggle exacted on their lives.
Allen, the mother of one of the student protest leaders, was the first to feel the aftershocks of the 1951 student walkout. The peaceful protest was aimed at bringing attention to massively overcrowded and substandard conditions at the county's high school for African Americans.
``Edwilda (my daughter) walked out that day with those children,'' Allen told the students at Longwood. ``I didn't know a thing about it . . . Just saw her going down the street, smiling like she was really doing something big.''
Allen said she and her husband supported her oldest daughter's role in the protest, but they also expected retribution.
When the reprisals came, they took the form of firings, credit revocations and general harassment, she said.
Allen was fired from her job with the county school system. Unable to find work elsewhere in Virginia, she took a job in North Carolina, returning to see her husband and two daughters only on weekends.
Job losses for Rawlins and Herndon came later, when the schools were closed in June 1959. The closure came after the federal government ordered Prince Edward to comply with Brown.
The two African-American teachers, now retired, were locked out of their classrooms along with the students at the end of the school year. Recalling the news of the closure, Rawlins said an article about it in the newspaper left her numb.
By the next school year, she had moved on to a teaching position in Charlottesville, more than an hour away, where she rented a room for herself and her young son. She would live in Farmville again for more than six years.
Herndon said that when the schools' closing ended her job, she and her husband had just bought a new house. They also had two preschool children to feed.
Eventually, she found a teaching position near Fredericksburg - about three hours away. The separation from her family during that time is still the most wrenching memory of her life, Herndon said.
Only able to return to Farmville one weekend a month during the four years she was away, Herndon said the time was ``very stressful.''
While the schools were closed, parents and concerned citizens worked to continue the children's education. A private school for white children was founded. Local church groups, out-of-state volunteers and others banded together to educate the African-American children as best they could.
On the verge of the anniversary of the walkout, members of the community have banded together again - this time to save the Moton School as a monument to the national desegregation struggle.
The small brick building is surrounded by shopping centers and fast-food restaurants in the town's main growth area. Moton has been used to house the school system's fifth grade, but the students will be moved after a $1.1 million addition to the county middle school is finished this summer.
County officials have said they plan to sell the school to the highest bidder to recoup money spent on the middle school. Possible buyers include nearby Longwood College. Commercial developers are rumored to be interested in the site.
``The building itself has outlived its usefulness. That's valuable land out there and someone might have a use for it,'' said county Board of Supervisors chairman Hugh Carwile.
Longwood officials have said they are interested in the school for the five acres around it. The land adjoins the college's athletic fields. But if Longwood did acquire the Moton property, ``we would be left with a building we would have no use for,'' said Rick Hurley, the state-run college's vice president for business affairs. ``Demolition is an option.''
Another option is proposed by a non-profit group, The Branch-Moton Historical Society, which is trying to purchase the building and turn it into a museum. More than 200 people contributed about $1,000 to save the school at a winter emergency meeting the society held.
KEYWORDS: INTERGRATION PUBLIC SCHOOLS by CNB