Robert E. Lee and Me

by Ty Seidule

  In 1958, Charlottesville and Norfolk schools as well as those in Prince Edward and Warren Counties closed by order of the governor. Thousands of schoolchildren went without education for half a decade so Virginia could, once again, maintain its racial code. The general assembly also created a voucher system using public funds to allow white parents to send their children to private schools. The federal courts ruled the closures and the vouchers unconstitutional, but Harry Byrd would not give up. He tried to persuade Governor Almond to call out the National Guard. One unverified account of that meeting suggests Byrd ordered Almond to shoot children if necessary. Almond allegedly replied, “I’ll do it, Harry, if you put it in writing.” White supremacists rarely give up their power without a fight. Almond finally relented, and token integration began peacefully in February 1959.65

  Alexandria was Northern Virginia’s only outpost for the Byrd machine. Byrd’s cousin was the mayor in the mid-1950s, and the city maintained the ideology of white supremacy. The Washington Post called Alexandria in 1957 “Northern Virginia’s last stronghold of conservatism” when conservatism meant racism.66 By 1958, the city’s leaders felt minimal accommodation was a better strategy than Byrd’s massive resistance, but it was for purely strategic reasons.

  The state senator Armistead Boothe represented Alexandria in the state legislature and believed in a mildly reformist agenda that earned him the enmity of the Byrd machine, but he was still a white supremacist. In a letter to a friend, he wrote that while there were extraordinary individual African Americans, the “Negro race, as a race, is very inferior to the white race.” Publicly, he told a Kiwanis Club in 1959, “I am a southerner, born and bred. As a result, I am a segregationist. I am not a degradationist. I have not, I do not, and shall not degrade every single American citizen who is born a Negro.”67 Yet, Boothe believed that compelling Virginians to desegregate schools would be “the keynote to tragedy.”68 Boothe had previously served as the prosecutor against the men who tried to integrate the Alexandria Public Library in the 1930s.

  To obey the letter if not the spirit of the Supreme Court decision, Virginia passed the Pupil Placement Law in 1956. The law allowed African American parents to petition the school board to admit their children to white schools, but the board found bigoted reasons to refuse admittance without mentioning race. It allowed schools to integrate only by court order and then on an individual child basis. Whether called “pupil placement” or “freedom of choice,” Virginia’s reaction to forced integration was tokenism, which limited desegregation.69 Leading the fight against the state’s plans to create segregation by another name was none other than Samuel Tucker, who at one time had 150 civil rights cases before state and federal courts.70

  Alexandria began to change to a new gradualist position in 1963 that would allow African American children to go to their neighborhood schools while accepting residential segregation. The gradualist position held sway until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, especially Title VI of that law, which prevented any federal money from going to an organization that discriminated on the basis of race. Alexandria’s new school superintendent, John Albohm, bragged that Alexandria was the first city in the state to meet the new standard, but with the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) took over the enforcement of integration from the court system.71

  In Alexandria, the problem was residential segregation. On the west side of town, where I lived, the neighborhoods were lily-white. In Old Town Alexandria, middle-class African American families had started moving out to avoid the poor school districts and endemic poverty. Alexandria refused to take on the residential problem to change the school districts. The superintendent said, “The School Board’s primary concern is education—not gerrymandering school districts to balance the white/Negro student ratio.” True enough. MacArthur Elementary, where I went to kindergarten in the summer of 1967, was 100 percent white, while Charles Houston Elementary was 100 percent African American.72

  Alexandria’s problem was in elementary schools, but it chose to solve the problem in the high schools because it was more politically feasible. The city’s solution became famous. In 1971, the city consolidated its three high schools. The predominantly African American high school, George Washington, became the school for all ninth graders. The tenth graders went to Francis C. Hammond, and the juniors and seniors went to T. C. Williams High School, across the street from me on Quaker Lane. The namesake of the school, T. C. Williams, was the longtime schools’ superintendent. While he did manage the growth during the World War II boom years, he was an ardent segregationist.73

  I knew about the city’s creation of a new school only because T. C. Williams became a football powerhouse in 1971. In 2000, the school became world renowned when Denzel Washington played Herman Boone, T. C. Williams’s coach in the movie Remember the Titans. The Titans won the state football championship that year. I remember that season because my dad was the head football coach at Episcopal High School and knew the white coach, Bill Yoast, who became Boone’s assistant coach.

  When city leaders created a single high school for the eleventh and twelfth grades, they were well aware of the potential to become a sports powerhouse, another possible way to unite the racially divided town. The plan to create one high school was a brilliant solution to bring white and Black together in Alexandria high schools. Unfortunately, it didn’t solve the problem identified by the Office for Civil Rights at HEW. The elementary schools like the one I went to remained completely segregated. The only way to solve that problem was to resort to busing. Alexandria fought it for as long as it could, but in the fall of 1973 it submitted.

  The day after Labor Day, I waited to take a bus to school for the first time. I was so excited to go to a school named after my hero Robert E. Lee. Alexandria’s plan was to pair schools like the all-white MacArthur with the predominantly African American Lee. White parents angry with the desegregation plan burned crosses on some school campuses. That year, Lee Elementary suffered through several bomb scares, but I liked the bomb threats for the extra recess time they created. During my year at Lee Elementary School, I ran for class president and lost with only 40 percent of the vote—the exact percentage of white kids in the school. Yet I also had an African American teacher and principal for the first and last time.74

  Alexandria, like so many cities, became a cauldron of racial violence as the evils of Jim Crow lifted but equal opportunity did not follow. African American citizens would no longer accept violence to enforce racial control. In 1970, Robin Gibson, an African American high school student, walked into a 7-Eleven in the Arlandria area of the city. John Hanna, the white store manager, accused the student of shoplifting. The situation escalated, and the manager shot the student in the neck, killing him. In an attempt to frame the young man, Hanna placed a knife near Gibson’s body as he lay dying. The city exploded with seven nights of firebombings, destruction of cars, and vandalism protesting the killing. Alexandria’s leaders then made it worse as the chief of police, Russell Hawes, told The Washington Post, “We usually don’t have too much trouble with the colored.”75

  Hanna’s murder trial confirmed the feelings of the African American community. Twelve white jurors failed to reach a decision because one juror would not convict under any circumstances. As one Black activist told The Washington Post, there was no chance a “white judge and a white jury in a courtroom decorated with a Confederate flag will give the same kind of justice to a white defendant that they would to [a] black one in the same case.” Eventually, the defendant pleaded guilty to manslaughter and served six months in jail before he was paroled.76

  In a packed church after the verdict, the pastor, Samuel NeSmith, told the crowd that Hanna’s short jail term was “a blow to the dignity and pride of a free society, especially black Alexandrians.” Then he got real: “This is how Alexandria became an all-American city—by keeping niggers in their
place.” When NeSmith sat, student leaders took his place in the pulpit. The president of George Washington High School’s sophomore class told the audience, “The so-called Christian white people who push the blacks aside in this city are going straight to hell.” The audience responded with a standing ovation.

  The state’s attorney defended his plea deal agreement when he met with 250 members of a youth group: “You know perfectly well that this was the most vigorous prosecution of a white defendant accused of killing a black man ever to take place in this courthouse.” A true statement that made the situation even worse.77

  White parents began to protest vigorously about the decline in discipline throughout the public school system, especially in the middle schools. I joined the huge numbers of white parents and kids who reacted to the “discipline” problem, code for integration, by fleeing the public schools. Rather than going to the Minnie Howard middle school less than a quarter mile from my home across Braddock Road, I was sent to St. Stephen’s School for seventh grade. I became part of the white flight from public schools.

  With whites leaving, Alexandria became more diverse, and eventually a coalition of more liberal whites and African Americans began to run the city. Alexandria, in fact, started to become a Washington suburb and lost much of its Old South ideology. The conservative town that I knew grew into a more diverse and inclusive city, but the process was painful, and it wasn’t long before many of the schools resegregated as the federal government lost its appetite to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

  * * *

  ALEXANDRIA WAS THE place that set my southern character and caused my wife amusement and consternation. Steeped in Old South nostalgia and racism, Alexandria inculcated me into the cult of the Confederacy. Almost from the cradle, I learned to worship the gentlemen in gray, especially Robert E. Lee. I knew what I wanted to be: an educated Christian gentleman, a Virginia gentleman. Every part of my childhood worshipped the four years of Confederate rule, even though Alexandria actually spent all but a few hours under U.S. control. In the aftermath of the war, Virginia led the South in creating and maintaining a police state based on racial control.

  Today, the more I learn about segregation and the Jim Crow system in Virginia, the more I agree with the great Virginia civil rights lawyer Oliver W. Hill Sr., a law partner with Samuel Tucker. Hill found a better way to explain the “Virginia way of life” that helped form me. In 1985, he described life for southern African American citizens during the Jim Crow era: “Virginia and the whole South were police states. There isn’t a question about that. Negroes didn’t serve on juries … You saw no blacks in places like city hall, or public buildings, unless, except, maybe an elevator operator or janitor. And that’s the way it was.”78 If the Virginia of my youth was no democracy, if I call a plantation an enslaved labor farm, then I should also call segregated Virginia by its true name—a racial police state. To be clear, the South of my birth was no democracy.

  When I go back to Alexandria today, many parts of the city that glorify the Confederate cause have changed, but many remain the same, even after an exhaustive study. In 2015, the city stopped flying a Confederate flag to commemorate Lee’s birthday and Confederate Memorial Day. Robert E. Lee Elementary School is gone. Two miles from my old home Samuel W. Tucker Elementary School educates white and Black kids. Seeing Tucker Elementary School made me smile. But another school named for a Confederate, Matthew Maury, still exists.

  The city renamed Jefferson Davis Highway, but scores of street names, including Janneys Lane, still recognize Confederates. The segregated library Alexandria created to prevent Samuel Tucker from using the all-white library is now Alexandria’s Black History Museum. The abandoned Civil War Black cemetery has been reconsecrated with a haunting memorial about slavery just down the street from the Confederate monument and Lee’s boyhood home.

  Maybe my wife is right. Alexandria might be a Washington suburb now. And that leaves me hopeful. Yet my white southern roots also know that beneath the veneer of civility lurks a dark past of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy. Maybe we are both right. Alexandria is both southern and not so southern, trying to shed its glorification of the Confederate cause incrementally. I understand. We find it hard to confront our past because it’s so ugly, but the alternative to ignoring our racist history is creating a racist future.

  3

  My Adopted Hometowns: A Hidden History as “Lynchtown”

  We moved to Walton County, Georgia, during a July heat wave in 1977. Or maybe every July is a heat wave in rural Georgia. My dad took his first headmaster job in Monroe, nestled in the jack pines of the Georgia Piedmont forty miles east of Atlanta. With eight thousand people, Monroe felt nothing like Alexandria. I drove around to the other towns in Walton County—Good Hope, Between, and Social Circle. Even the names sounded foreign to me.

  After years of living on campus in housing provided by my dad’s schools, my parents bought our first house across the street from the all-white country club. Back in Alexandria, the city had started to integrate. I went to school with African American kids, and my dad taught and coached Black teenagers. Monroe was different. During my first year there, I didn’t talk to a Black person. It was only decades later that I realized Monroe was nearly 50 percent African American.

  As a new high school student in Monroe, I wanted to play football. My dad had been a football and track star in college at Sewanee, the University of the South. At Episcopal High School, he coached football for decades. As a kid, I served as his team’s manager and became obsessed with football, riveted to our TV for every game played by my hometown Washington Redskins.

  Starting in the fourth grade, I played peewee football. Football and only football. No soccer for me. My dad and his entire generation made fun of soccer; it was a game for Europeans or, even worse, Yankees. Both groups were equally foreign. Besides, even had I wanted to play another game, which I did not, my new school in Monroe offered only two fall sports—football for boys and cheerleading for girls.

  At the start of my sophomore year, I stood five feet eight and tipped the scales at a scrawny 145 pounds. Not only was I small, but I was slow too. My dream of emulating my father’s success on the gridiron died quickly. Instead, I feared that I wouldn’t even make the high school team. Not to worry. Every boy in school made the team. In my entire class, there were nineteen kids, nine of whom were boys, and everyone played football.

  At the end of my first practice, I went to the locker room to shower and passed a mirror. My white uniform had turned orange. In the Georgia Piedmont, the soil has rich deposits of iron. Without vegetation, the weathering process turns the soil red. The practice field had no irrigation and therefore precious little vegetation, just a few clumps of brave weeds trying to grow in the dry clay. Monroe’s soil mirrored Margaret Mitchell’s fictional Tara, only an hour’s drive away in Clayton County. “It was a savagely red land, blood colored after rains, brick dust in droughts.”1

  If the lack of grass was awful, the smell was even worse. Our gridiron abutted one of the many poultry slaughterhouses in that area of Georgia. Everyone in town called it “the chicken-poultry plant.” As a southerner, I have extensive experience with foul-smelling industries, which took advantage of the non-union, cheap-labor, low-regulation, and business-friendly South. Three industries produce more stink than all the others combined—paper mills, hog farms, and chicken slaughterhouses. My school’s practice field on a stifling August afternoon gave me plenty of opportunity to confirm that chicken slaughterhouses reek the worst.

  My school was next to a slaughterhouse because the land was cheap. The twelve men who founded George Walton Academy (GWA) met on March 19, 1969, at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, the same church where I would later serve as head acolyte. George Hearn III, army veteran, lawyer, and judge, reported to the Dirty Dozen, as the founders called themselves, about the feasibility of starting a private school. Hearn had looked at other communities, and he believed Walton County
could support a private school too, but there was a catch. Each man had to sign the bank loan to buy the land adjacent to the slaughterhouse and build the campus. Two members of the Dirty Dozen gave land off Spring Street, and the board bought adjacent property as well. Then the men co-signed a much larger loan to build the campus, betting their financial future on a new school. On March 26, Hearn incorporated the school, with the Dirty Dozen now the board of trustees.2

  George Walton Academy had one purpose when it was founded: ensure white kids didn’t have to go to school with Black kids. I went to high school in a segregation, or “seggie,” academy. The road map to creating a whites-only private school in Walton County, Georgia, mirrored that of many southern states. A privately funded school was the last resort after the state had tried and failed to maintain its apartheid system of education.

  After World War II, the federal court system began the long road to declaring segregation unconstitutional. Southern states saw the future and fought like hell to maintain Jim Crow. Georgia’s governor Eugene Talmadge won election in 1946 on a segregation platform pledging to fight any and all civil rights. In 1950, his son, Herman, won the governor’s race vowing to thwart any plan for school integration. As he said, “Non-segregation in our schools will never work as long as red blood runs in white men’s veins.” Or, if that wasn’t clear enough, Talmadge declared, “As long as I am your governor, Negroes will not be admitted to white schools in Georgia.”3