Norfolk locks out ten thousand children
Closed 27 September 1958; reopened 2 February 1959Six Norfolk public schools, VA
To keep seventeen Black students out, Virginia closed six Norfolk schools and shut roughly 10,000 white students out with them - the largest of the Massive Resistance closures. It lasted four months.
In 1958 US district judge Walter E. Hoffman ordered Norfolk to admit Black students to its white secondary schools. Seventeen were assigned. On 27 September Governor J. Lindsay Almond Jr. closed every school they had been assigned to: Granby, Maury and Norview high schools, and Blair, Northside and Norview junior highs. Roughly 10,000 white students were locked out alongside them. It was by far the largest of Virginia's Massive Resistance closures - six of the nine schools, and about three-quarters of the nearly 13,000 students shut out statewide.
Norfolk's city council, led by Mayor W. Fred Duckworth, backed the closure and resisted reopening. Families improvised for four months: tutoring groups in churches and front rooms, privately organised classes, relatives in other cities, and for a great many students nothing at all. Some never went back to school.
The pressure that ended it came from the city's own business leadership, which concluded publicly that Norfolk could not keep a naval economy and close its schools at the same time. On 19 January 1959 the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals and a federal district court both struck down the closure statutes, and on 2 February the six schools reopened.
The seventeen students walked in that morning - the Norfolk 17 - and met a year arranged to make them leave: separated in classes, kept out of teams and clubs, spat at in corridors, and in several cases steered out of the schools altogether. The white students who should have graduated that spring are remembered in Norfolk as the Lost Class of '59, the title of a CBS documentary narrated by Edward R. Murrow the following year.
About 10,000 students were shut out for four months - roughly three-quarters of everyone locked out by Virginia's closures. The shape is the city of Norfolk, drawn indicatively; the authoritative boundary is the Census TIGER/Line place file.
Sources
- Massive ResistanceEncyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanitiesencyclopediavirginia.orgBacks Judge Walter E. Hoffman's decree, the 27 September 1958 closure of six Norfolk schools, the figure of about 10,000 displaced students, and the reopening on 2 February 1959.
- W. Fred Duckworth (1899-1972)Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanitiesencyclopediavirginia.orgThe mayor who backed the closure, and the city council's part in keeping the schools shut.
- School Desegregation in Norfolk, VirginiaOld Dominion University Librariesexhibits.lib.odu.eduA documented timeline of 1958 from the university's own collections, naming the six closed schools and the Norfolk 17.