by Ty Seidule
Tucker created a plan that would become famous two decades later at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and cities throughout the South in 1960. He recruited five young Black men to enter the library sequentially. Each man asked for a library card. When the librarian refused, declaring only white people had access, the men went to shelves, selected a book, sat down, and started reading. Tucker made sure that each person took a seat at a separate table so there was no possibility that chatter could be construed as “disturbing the peace.”
While the men sat peaceably, a fourteen-year-old boy ran from the library to Tucker’s office to describe the unfolding events. The librarian asked the men to leave and threatened to call the police if they did not. One man gave the response for them all: “Well, we are staying.” When the police escorted the men outside the library, they found two or three hundred people waiting, including reporters and photographers. Wisely, Tucker ensured the incident received as much publicity as possible.40
As he prepared for white Alexandrians’ response, he knew the men had broken no state laws. Virginia’s 1926 Public Assemblages Act mandated only that races be segregated within a building. The event flummoxed Alexandria’s white leaders because they couldn’t imagine the Black populace would protest or, when they did, that it would be so brilliantly executed. As Tucker later said, city officials “didn’t know what in the world to do.” He knew the law better than the authorities. After hours of indecision, the city manager finally ordered police to charge the five men with disturbing the peace, even though the police acknowledged no peace was disturbed. Tucker cut to the real issue: “They were disorderly because they were black.”41
The white city leaders described Tucker and his team as “over-zealous” because they went outside the segregation system by protesting in the library rather than going through “the proper authorities.” When the case went to trial, the city attorney, Armistead Boothe, argued “with much embarrassment” that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed equal protection and due process, had been forced upon Virginia. Therefore, the U.S. Constitution did not apply to the Old Dominion. Tucker had attacked segregation in Alexandria head-on and forced the city’s leaders to confess that Jim Crow had a dubious legal standing.42
In the short run, Tucker lost his fight to end segregation in Alexandria, but he put up a fight, a fight I knew nothing about. Most histories talk about the civil rights movement starting in the 1950s. Lately, more historians are talking of a long civil rights movement that started much earlier. Samuel Tucker, from my hometown, demanded an end to Jim Crow laws in the 1930s as a twentysomething. He should have been a hero for me and every child in Alexandria.43
With World War II bearing down, the Alexandria Public Library sit-in, as the newspapers called it, was lost on the public trying to deal with the coming conflagration. Tucker joined the army and became an officer in the 366th Infantry Regiment, one of the few segregated units with Black officers. He saw combat in Italy, rising to the rank of major.44
After serving in the Jim Crow army during the war, Tucker returned to the United States. He became even more determined to combat the racial police state in Virginia. Convinced there were too many lawyers in Alexandria, he moved farther south to Emporia, the heart of Virginia’s Black Belt, where African Americans formed a greater percentage of the population but had even less power. With no Black judges, lawyers, or jurors, African Americans’ only role in the judicial system was as defendants.
Tucker became such a thorn in the side of the white apartheid community that he feared for his family’s safety and moved out of town, building a house with two doors to each room to prevent his family from being trapped. The white powers were right to fear him. He eventually became the lead attorney for the NAACP challenging segregation in Virginia, filing suit in Alexandria and nearly fifty other counties and cities to force white officials to obey the landmark federal court cases like Brown v. Board of Education.45
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SAMUEL TUCKER SHOULD have been my hero. Instead, I worshipped Lee and his Confederate colleagues. As Tucker fought for equality, Alexandria doubled down on memorializing Confederates. The city passed a law in 1953 requiring all new street names that ran north and south to honor Confederates.46 The timing of the change was no accident. In 1953, a court case challenging a segregated school in Farmville, Virginia, was working its way up through the federal court system. Eventually, it would be one of the five cases that became Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the name of the Supreme Court case that overturned the legality of a segregated school system.
Only in 2014 did the Alexandria City Council finally repeal the law, but not before the city named up to sixty-six streets after Confederates.47 Alexandria has more than twice as many things named for Confederates as the next leading Virginia city, the capital of the Confederacy, Richmond.48 My hometown wanted to prove it was southern and against civil rights. No better way to prove its white southern bona fides than by memorializing its hometown heroes, Robert E. Lee and other Confederates.
The city council chambers featured a late nineteenth-century portrait of Lee donated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and emplaced in 1964. Again and again, memorials to Lee and the Confederates would reappear when African Americans demanded and especially when they succeeded in furthering civil rights. Next to the portrait, a placard quoted a letter Lee wrote to his friends in 1870 as they tried to raise money to rebuild the city. “There is no community to which my affections more strongly cling than that of Alexandria, composed of my earliest and oldest friends, my schoolfellows, and faithful neighbors.”49 That’s the Alexandria I knew. One that highlighted its ties to Lee and the Confederates.50
My first school, Douglas MacArthur Elementary, was on Janneys Lane, named for Major Eli Janney, a Confederate quartermaster officer on Lee’s staff. MacArthur Elementary was an all-white school built during World War II to support the huge influx of men and women working for the federal government and building the Pentagon.
I knew MacArthur was a heroic general, but I remember little about the curriculum. As I researched why Lee and the Confederacy had such a hold on me as a child, I found another insidious way the state inculcated the Lost Cause myth—Virginia history textbooks. The state created textbooks for the fourth, seventh, and eleventh grades to use history to teach us the “Virginia way of life.” I certainly had the fourth-grade book. Schools continued to use these textbooks through the 1970s.51
Virginia: History, Government, Geography, the seventh-grade book, featured a chapter titled “How the Negroes Lived Under Slavery.” The cover illustration for the chapter went beyond bad history into farce. Stage right, a dignified man in colonial attire with top hat, long coat, and striped trousers shows that he is an educated Christian gentleman. He shakes hands while his left hand grips the other man’s shoulder. Clearly there is a bond here as the gentleman steps toward the man as if to welcome him. The other man is dressed in a suit as well with a traveling bag at his side. The center of the illustration shows a well-appointed family. A young boy of eight or nine holding a hat stands close to his father. An older, well-dressed teenage boy carries a knapsack and looks at the two men shaking hands with obvious respect. Stage left, the man’s two smartly dressed daughters stand next to their mother. A huge bonnet covers the mother’s entire head as she holds a handkerchief to her face, overcome by emotion as if to say finally we have arrived and this gentleman will make our long journey worth the trip.52
The dapper family—husband, wife, and four children—look as though they completed a family holiday on a Princess cruise ship. In reality, the African family crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a slave ship, the infamous Middle Passage. Unlike the fantasy portrayed in the Virginia history textbook, the enslaved suffered about a 15 percent mortality rate from disease, suffocation, execution, or suicide. One contemporary writer described going into the hold where the Africans were held. It was only about four and a half fe
et tall. “So close and foul was the stench” some enslaved Africans “have been known to be put down the hold strong and healthy at night; and have been dead in the morning.”53
According to my textbook, the white gentleman just purchased the African family, and they eagerly await bondage not only for the rest of their lives but for their children’s and grandchildren’s lives—perpetual enslavement. The illustration portrays a ghastly fantasy, really a nightmare, that the family will work hard, for free, for eternity, and in exchange the slave owner will care for the family for the rest of their lives. As another one of the trio of history books told young Virginians, the African family begins their enslavement in a system similar to “comprehensive social security.”54
I read through the Virginia history textbook with disbelief, followed by profound anger. I checked the publishing data: first edition 1957; second edition and the one I read 1964. All the lies of the Lost Cause myth in one convenient package to inculcate Virginia children, like me, with the same racist ideology: states’ rights and tariffs as the cause of the Civil War; slavery as a positive good; the War Between the States, not the Civil War; the evils of Reconstruction; the heroism of the Confederate soldier; the righteousness of the cause; the godliness of the Virginia way of life; and, of course, Lee as god. No mention in the book of Harriet Tubman, who led many enslaved people to freedom. No mention of Samuel Tucker. I expected all of that, but the way the text dealt with slavery was the most preposterous and the most chilling.
The seventh-grade textbook stated that “life among the Negroes of Virginia in slavery times was generally happy.” The authors explained why: “In Africa they had known a form of slavery more stern than that of the Virginia plantations.” Therefore, “the Negroes learned also to enjoy the work … of the plantation.” Slavery worked for everyone because “a strong tie existed between slave and master because each was dependent on the other. The master needed the work and loyalty of his slaves. The slave was dependent for all his needs on the master.” Reading these lies, I felt as if the author were channeling Margaret Mitchell from Gone With the Wind.55
How did the textbook authors deal with the problems of slavery, like the lash? “In those days whipping was the usual method for correcting children. The planter looked upon his slaves as children and punished them as such.” Whipping, the authors argued, was family discipline from a well-intentioned father. Despite whipping, “a feeling of strong affection existed between masters and slaves in Virginia.” How about the awful practice of splitting families and selling children out of state to receive the highest price on the auction block? The book argued that Virginia plantation owners didn’t want to split families but had no choice because of hard economic times. Moreover, the enslaved sold to the Deep South away from their loved ones were unhappy because they had to leave their “beloved” Virginia. “Negroes did not wish to leave their old masters.”56
As a schoolkid in Virginia, I never received an honest accounting of slavery. Many historians have now given us a clear look at the slave trade, plantation life (that is, life on the enslaved labor farms), and slave rebellions. Every aspect of slavery was just as evil as the abolitionists and the peerlessly honest former slave Frederick Douglass described it. If anything, the conditions were worse. The only way to argue for slavery, then or now, is to believe that the enslaved weren’t real human beings. That the lives of those who had darker skin had less worth; that the color of skin meant the difference between human and not quite human. And that is the hideous lesson my Virginia history textbook taught schoolchildren in the Old Dominion.
The Virginia legislature created a textbook commission in response to what it considered a shocking development. In 1947, President Harry S. Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights horrified white Virginia politicians with a simple statement, recommending the “elimination of segregation based on race, color, creed, or national origin from American life.” For the Virginia legislature controlled by the ultraconservative political machine led by the Democrat Harry F. Byrd, the commission’s charge to eliminate segregation was a call to arms. Starting in 1948, the general assembly created a commission led by a prominent segregationist to study what children learned about the state’s history. The answer—young Virginians’ education failed to provide a strong historical foundation for white supremacy. The general assembly then created a textbook commission to write and publish three textbooks for use in every public school in the state.57
The purpose of the textbooks went beyond facts; the commissioners hoped “to instill in [schoolchildren’s] hearts and minds a greater love of Virginia and a perpetuation of her ideals.” The textbook commission wanted their selected authors to capture the genteel tradition of the Old Dominion known as the Virginia spirit. While the commission never explicitly defined it, one member emphasized the “generous and kindly traits in the Virginia spirit.” I understood. The commission wanted to create educated Christian ladies and gentlemen who looked at history from a positive point of view without being boastful. The commission told the authors to emphasize Virginia’s right to secede. Above all, avoid critiquing slavery. “Is the matter of slavery presented in the very ablest and best light?” they asked. The commissioners directed that the textbook authors “not give the impression that slavery was the cause of the war.”58
While the books created an imaginary past, the legislature set its eyes firmly on present difficulties. In 1954, while the authors wrote, the Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, outlawing school segregation. The Democratic Byrd machine’s reaction was to lead not only Virginia but the entire white South in a “Massive Resistance” campaign against integration. The textbook’s treatment of the Civil War offered contemporary lessons to all Virginia’s children—Black and white. In the antebellum era, they argued, slavery was positive for both master and slave. In the 1950s, segregation was also a net positive for both races.
From the commission’s point of view, during “the War Between the States,” Virginia fought bravely against federal overreach and for states’ rights even after the cause was lost. In the 1950s, Virginians should also fight against the imposition of federal overreach on the state’s rights and institutions. The United States hoped to nullify the Virginia way of life. Virginia should fight and fight to the bitter end even if the cause was lost.
Several groups protested against these textbooks. The all-Black Virginia Teachers Association wrote in 1964, “This is not objective history; it is Virginia’s history as a [white] Virginian sees it, or rather as he would like to keep it.” By 1972, the texts had become an embarrassment to the state. The Virginia Council for the Social Studies, representing teachers who used the books in the classrooms, called the texts “ridiculous and reprehensible.” Although not everyone was on board. Frances Butler Simkins, a professor at Longwood College in Farmville, Virginia, and president of the Southern Historical Association, wrote the seventh-grade book. He refused to back down, writing that slavery “did not create a Second Heaven but it did bring the Negro barbarian into the circle of American civilization.”59
In 1972, my fifth-grade year, the State Board of Education announced that the Virginia histories were decommissioned or, as one reporter wrote, “thrown in the trash basket.” Governor Linwood Holton, the first Republican to serve as Virginia governor since Reconstruction, tried to have them immediately removed, but he ran into opposition in the legislature and backed down. The books continued to be used at least through the late 1970s.60 The Virginia textbooks formed one of the most powerful testaments to white supremacy, an insidious monument that poisoned children’s minds for a generation.61
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MASSIVE RESISTANCE TO school desegregation led to the Virginia history textbooks and their despicable description of slavery. Yet by the time I entered kindergarten, massive resistance to integration had mainly failed. The Byrd machine ran on white votes, especially in the southern arc of the state. When Virginia created a new constitution
after Reconstruction, it ratified a poll tax to disenfranchise African Americans. White Virginians boldly stated their purpose. State Senator Carter Glass exclaimed, “Discrimination! Why, that is precisely what we propose; that, exactly, is what this convention was elected for—to discriminate … with a view to the elimination of every negro voter who can be gotten rid of.” When African Americans began to vote with the help of federal court decisions, the Byrd machine’s power started to wane. That’s why they saw integration as such a threat. The courts would give everyone the ballot, and the white supremacists’ hold on elected office would weaken.62
As a kid attending Alexandria public schools in the 1970s, I dealt with integration, not massive resistance. In the fall of 1973, I was bused from all-white MacArthur Elementary on the west side of town to a school that was more than 85 percent African American in the southeast part of Alexandria. What was the name of the nearly segregated Black school, named in 1961, that I attended in sixth grade? Robert E. Lee Elementary School.
As a child, I did not understand the cruel irony of naming a predominantly African American school after a Confederate icon who fought to create a slave republic. The story of how I ended up attending Lee Elementary School shows Virginia’s extensive efforts to maintain white supremacy until the federal courts forced it to change.63
When the Supreme Court issued its decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, it overturned one aspect of the carefully constructed system of the racial police state in the South. Virginia did not accept the Supreme Court’s decision. Initially, the Virginia governor Lindsay Almond counseled moderation, but the U.S. senator Harry Byrd, who controlled Virginia politics with an iron fist, reacted with fury when he heard Almond would acquiesce to the highest court in the land. “The top blew off the U.S. Capitol,” Almond recalled. Byrd announced the state’s strategy in 1956: “If we can organize the Southern states for massive resistance to this order … the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South.” Almond was soon on board, declaring, “We will oppose with every facility at our command, and with every ounce of our energy, the attempt being made to mix the white and Negro races in our classrooms.” Virginia followed that pronouncement with laws to back up its position, ordering schools to shutter rather than integrate.64