Charlottesville shuts Lane High and Venable Elementary
Closed 19 September 1958; reopened 4 February 1959Lane High School and Venable Elementary School, Charlottesville, VA
Two days before twelve Black children were due to start, the governor closed both schools. They stayed shut for five months, reopened segregated, and admitted the twelve only in September 1959.
Twelve Black children won the right to attend Charlottesville's white schools in 1958, after federal district judge John Paul ordered the city to desegregate: three at Lane High School and nine at Venable Elementary. On 19 September 1958, two days before they were to start, Governor J. Lindsay Almond Jr. closed both schools under Virginia's Massive Resistance laws.
Charlottesville was a university town that thought of itself as moderate, and it organised its resistance as carefully as any Southside county. The Charlottesville Education Foundation set up private segregated schools - Rock Hill Academy and a second school named for Robert E. Lee - taught at first in churches and private houses, with tuition paid in part by state grants. The city's Black schools stayed open throughout, because the state had never proposed to close them.
The closure laws fell on 19 January 1959. Lane and Venable reopened on 4 February, but segregated: for the rest of that school year the Black students admitted by the court were taught separately, in an annex at Venable. Judge Paul ordered the transfers carried out immediately, and on 8 September 1959 the twelve finally entered the schools they had won access to eighteen months earlier.
What followed was slower and more durable than a locked door. Pupil placement boards, redrawn attendance zones and tuition grants that paid white families to leave the public system kept Charlottesville's schools substantially segregated through the 1960s. The city council voted a formal apology to the Charlottesville Twelve half a century afterwards.
The shape is the city of Charlottesville, drawn indicatively; the authoritative boundary is the Census TIGER/Line place file. Lane High School stood on Melbourne Road, Venable Elementary on 14th Street NW.
Sources
- Massive ResistanceEncyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanitiesencyclopediavirginia.orgBacks Judge John Paul's order, the 19 September 1958 closure of Lane and Venable, and the 19 January 1959 rulings that ended the closures.
- Desegregation of Virginia Public SchoolsEncyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanitiesencyclopediavirginia.orgThe pupil placement, attendance zones and tuition grants that kept Virginia's schools segregated after the closures failed.
- The Moderates' Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in VirginiaUniversity Press of Virginia (1998)Edited by Matthew D. Lassiter and Andrew B. Lewis; includes the organisation of private schooling in Charlottesville during the closure.