Virginia's Lost Class of 1959Norfolk's 'Lost Class' to finally be recognized
 Norfolk's 'Lost Class' to finally be recognized
NORFOLK, Va. (AP) - When six public schools closed 50 years ago rather than accept black students, 10,000 white students in Norfolk were locked out of classrooms during Virginia's last, desperate gasp to resist integration.
Collectively, they were called the “Lost Class of 1959” for all they missed - friendships, athletic competition, diplomas and, for some, a future they envisioned.
“We were really abandoned by the very authority figures that we respected back then,” said Mary Jane Birdsong, a member of the Lost Class. “How dare they close our schools. It was just a bloody mess.”
The white teenagers whose lives were turned upside down by state-sanctioned racism say they have lived in the shadows of the Virginia's rich civil rights tableau. Their obscurity will end Monday.
A “unity march” on Martin Luther King Day will be led by the 14 surviving members of the “Norfolk 17,” the first black students to integrate the city's all-white schools. The march will also include at least 100 members of the Lost Class _ the group's first formal recognition as part of the collateral damage of official state racism.
Norfolk officials decided to include the Lost Class to represent all the players in the city's civil rights drama, said Charles Hartig, a spokesman for Mayor Paul Fraim.
“It was decided we really needed to broaden the focus of the observance to make it as meaningful as possible because so many people participated in the final chapter,” Hartig said.
“Their story has never been told,” he said of the Lost Class.
While the white students, now in their 60s, acknowledge that the Norfolk 17 should properly remain the central living symbols of that period, they are ecstatic that their lost year is being acknowledged.
“Not to take anything away from the Norfolk 17, because what they went through was tremendous, but we are very grateful that the city has chosen to recognize us,” said Suzanne Shipp Owens, 67, who was a senior at Granby High School when it closed. “Through no fault of our own, this happened.”
Members of the Norfolk 17 who were interviewed acknowledged the hardships of their white former classmates, and said they accept their recognition in the city's official observance. They were quick to point out, however, the isolation and abuse they suffered among their white classmates.
“I don't think the recognition is exactly on the same level,” said Andrew Heidelberg, one of the Norfolk 17. “When things settled down, they went back to their normal routine.”
He added, “I really didn't see many people who said they didn't have any problem with the blacks coming to school.”
“Massive Resistance” - a termed coined by U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr. _ was embraced as a Virginia rallying cry to defy the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision ruling school segregation unconstitutional.
Charlottesville and Warren County also locked their all-white public schools rather than integrate, and Prince Edward County continued its own style of school segregation into the 1960s. But nowhere was Massive Resistance as widely felt as in Norfolk, then Virginia's largest city.
Three all-white high schools and three all-white junior high schools closed in September 1958, leaving nearly 10,000 students out of classes for half a school year. Norfolk's separate all-black schools remained open.
Private schools were opened to accept white students, and some of the displaced students were educated in tutoring groups in churches and homes and at schools in neighboring communities, said Peggy Haile McPhillips, city historian for Norfolk.
After Maury High School closed, Mary Jane Birdsong was taught by two teachers in the attic of a home.
Tommy L. Bogger, archivist at Norfolk State University, said approximately 3,000 white students never returned to their public schools.
Suzanne Shipp Owens returned to Granby High School in the winter of 1959 and was among 177 white seniors out of a class of 487 who went on to graduate at Granby. She was taught in a synagogue while Granby was closed.
“Some ended up getting married and getting their GEDs later,” Owens said of her “lost” Granby classmates. “Others went into the military.”
Norfolk's schools were integrated under a federal court order on Feb. 2, 1959, when the Norfolk 17 started class in the city's previously all-white schools. Interviewed a half-century later, the surviving 17 still recall the fear and loneliness of attending previously all-white schools.
Patricia Godbolt White, now 66, was one of seven black students who attended Norview High. A cross was burned on her front lawn, and some teachers and white students treated her poorly.
“We were demonstrating passive resistance,” she said of her fellow black students. “The taunting and all that, we just ignored that.”
Still, White sees a role for the Lost Class in Norfolk's commemoration.
“I have to be forgiving, not necessarily forgetting,” she said, adding she tries not to think about “the bad things that happened.”
In interviews, few members of the Lost Class could recall details of the abuse directed at the Norfolk 17 when the white students returned to their integrated schools. Many, however, have vivid recollections of the solitary figures who integrated their schools, and several expressed regret they didn't speak out 50 years ago about the treatment of their new classmates.
Frances Leith Werner, 68, remembers Geraldine Talley Hobby at Granby High School.
“Her name has always stuck with me,” said Werner, who now lives in Maryland. “I can see her walking down the hall as close to the wall as she could get. I felt sorry for her.”
Gracie Bottino Kirchgessner, 67 and living in Chapel Hill, N.C., also recalls seeing Hobby at Granby, though she did not remember her name.
“When no one was looking, I ran over to welcome her to school,” Kirchgessner said. “She was really ignored.”
In an interview last year, Hobby recalled the time as “very hostile, very traumatic.” Fearful of physical attacks, her brother and father took turns taking her to school and picking her up.
The unity march will also include the families of Walter E. Hoffman, the federal judge who ruled Massive Resistance unconstitutional; and Lenoir Chambers, the editor at The Virginian-Pilot newspaper who won a Pulitzer Prize for his condemnation of Massive Resistance.
By Steve Szkotak AP
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