[For this year’s installment of my annual Charlottesville series—following the boys and my annual trip to my childhood home, natch—I’ll focus on a handful of representative places around town. Leading up to a tribute to the public schools that nurtured this AmericanStudier!]
On what a historic educational place can
tell us about three distinct 20th century eras.
1)
The 1920s: As I’ve written about at length
both in
this space and elsewhere,
it was in the 1920s that Charlottesville erected its infamous white supremacist
statues, one of many illustrations of how the second
Ku Klux Klan and all it represented had most definitely come to town (or
more exactly had been
there all along). But the ‘20s were also the era of the Harlem Renaissance,
of the continuing legacies of the Great
Migration (which meant not only movement between regions but also the
search for opportunities and freedoms all over the country), and overall of an African
American community willing and able to stand up for its communal rights and
needs. And in Charlottesville, members of that community successfully petitioned
the City Council in 1926 to create a high school for Black students, who
previously had had no educational option beyond 8th grade in town.
That school, the product of the best of Cville (and America) in an era too
often defined by the worst, was the Jefferson School.
2)
The 1940s: It took some time for the school to
become a full community of its own (although even a bare bones high school was
a vast improvement to be sure), but by the 1940s it was as thriving
and vibrant a community as any high school could be. It had a Dramatics Club
with over 100 members, a music department with a full band (that performed in
1941 at tomorrow’s focal place, the Paramount Theater) and a trio of choral
ensembles, multiple sports teams that traveled the state (with the band
traveling with the football team), and its own newspaper The Jeffersonian
that included not only writers and editors but advertising and circulation
managers. It also of course had a high school yearbook, Crimson
and Black, and I believe that yearbook’s 1944 dedication reflects just
how much this (by which I mean both the school and the African American
community) was both an inspiring community in its own right and a powerful part
of the era’s American landscape: “To the boys of Jefferson High School who have
willingly answered the call of our country and who are serving in the armed
forces to bring to our land once more a lasting peace.”
3)
1958: I need to be very, very clear, however:
even the most vibrant segregated school was still a segregated school, still a
particularly striking embodiment of Jim Crow’s discrimination against young
African Americans. Clearly Charlottesville’s African American community felt
the same, as in September 1958, in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education and Little Rock, a number of Jefferson
School students and their families applied
to white-only schools (high schools and elementary schools) across the
city. As I’ve written
about at length, the Charlottesville schools literally shut down, closed to
all students, rather than admit these African American students, one of the
nation’s most extreme examples of massive resistance. They remained closed for
a year, but the writing was on the wall, both for segregated education in the
city and thus (happily, but nonetheless) for the Jefferson School. But it has
remained standing, used occasionally as a substitute school in the city and
always as a historic site, one featuring for example placards that commemorate “The Triumph of the Charlottesville
Twelve” (the first dozen students who pushed for integration). One more
vital and inspiring memory housed in the Jefferson School.
Last
Cville place tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Defining places—from your hometowns or anywhere else—you’d
highlight?
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