THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, September 25, 1995 TAG: 9509250067
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JON GLASS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Long : 109 lines
It was 1935, the depths of the Great Depression, and Arlethia Woodard was resigned to the life of a domestic, her dream of being a teacher dashed by poverty.
Woodard's family couldn't afford to send her to college after she graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in 1930. So she cleaned houses and cared for the children of white families for $5 a week. Her mother was a maid, too, and her father scraped by as a coal trimmer, shoveling train cars full of coal.
Then a remarkable thing happened.
On Sept. 24, 1935, a college for local blacks, the Norfolk Unit of Virginia Union University, opened in a three-story building that also housed the YMCA in downtown Norfolk.
It changed Woodard's life.
``Opening that school was a blessing for us,'' Woodard said. ``If not, we'd still just have been maids or butlers or something like that. I always wanted to be a teacher.''
Sixty years later, the Norfolk Unit has grown into the nation's fourth-largest historically black university, serving nearly 9,000 students. The campus has expanded to 134 acres and 38 buildings.
Today it is called Norfolk State University.
At its annual fall convocation Sunday, the official welcome for its freshmen, the university honored that first class. The theme, part of the school's 60th anniversary celebration, was ``Sixty Years of Progress . . . and Counting.''
Eleven members of the class, now in their late 70s and early 80s, sat together at the NSU stadium.
``We sometimes forget our history and take it lightly,'' university President Harrison B. Wilson told the several thousand students and faculty attending. ``I want the class to know that we love you, we revere you.''
Most of the 85 members of the 1935 class have ``passed,'' as member Edward Cox, 83, of Chesapeake put it. Only about 25 are left, scattered around the country.
With the gift of a college education, they became the educators, ministers, doctors, lawyers and business people who spread out and served the needs of the black community.
``Most of the students in that freshmen class went out in life and were successful in various careers,'' said Cox, who became a teacher. He retired as a junior high school principal in Chesapeake.
Wilson, president of NSU for 20 years, said the university was founded by local African-American leaders to serve black families in South Hampton Roads. Like Woodard, most lacked the means to go away to college.
``They felt if the community was going to survive, they had to educate these people,'' Wilson said in an interview. ``The fact that people did that right in the middle of the Depression is amazing.''
They convinced officials at Virginia Union University in Richmond to open the Norfolk Unit. Then they spoke at local church services and went door to door to recruit students.
Cox, a 1930 graduate of Portsmouth's I.C. Norcom High School, was one of the young people they came looking for.
``Men out here with families were working for 15 cents an hour,'' Cox said. ``After high school, I went to work in construction. I wasn't too proud to use a pick or shovel to make some money, and I intended to save enough for college.''
He remembers paying $100 tuition for the year. A ferry ride across the Elizabeth River between Portsmouth and Norfolk to attend classes cost him 5 cents each way.
Through a Depression-era jobs program, the National Youth Administration, Cox earned $45 in tuition money from the federal government.
A couple of the professors taught full-time in Norfolk but most traveled from Richmond a day or two each week, Woodard said. Students studied English, French, science, history and sociology, and could take a Bible class.
In the early days, the Norfolk Unit offered a two-year program. Many students then transferred to Virginia Union.
After graduating with a history degree from Virginia Union in 1939, Woodard was hired as an elementary teacher in Norfolk. She retired in 1972 after a 33-year teaching career.
``At that time most of us went into teaching because we did not have the opportunities like young people do today,'' Woodard said.
Earl Braxton, 79, of Norfolk, a 1935 Booker T. Washington High graduate, called the Norfolk Unit a ``God-sent thing.'' He taught at a five-room school in Buckingham County before World War II and a stint in the Army intervened.
After the war, Braxton, like Cox, took advantage of a summer graduate program offered to blacks at the University of Michigan. He eventually earned a master's degree in education, retiring as principal of the old Ruffner Junior High.
Class members spent an hour Sunday reminiscing. They remembered deceased classmates and recalled fond memories of the place that opened up their world.
``I was a poor boy from a poor family and Norfolk Unit gave me an opportunity to start college and keep me inspired to go on from there,'' said Dr. St. Paul Epps, officially the first student to pay his tuition.
``I still think that Norfolk State is doing a terrific job,'' Woodard said, ``and I still carry a little torch for them.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color staff photo by Lawrence Jackson
Arlethia Woodard, who started at NSU in 1935, became a teacher.
B\W photo by Lawence Jackson Norfolk State alumni, from left, Edward
Cox, Erma H. Hoggard, Arlethia Woodard and Dr. St. Paul Epps
reminisce about their 50th anniversary celebration and about the
friends who did not make it to the 60th. The school honored its 1935
class at the fall convocation Sunday.
KEYWORDS: NORFOLK STATE UNIVERSITY by CNB