Friday September 19, 2008

It made major headlines 50 years ago in Charlottesville; faced with integration Venable and Lane schools shut down.

Seventeen hundred white students had to find other accomodations, just so city leaders could keep a dozen black students from attending the schools.

"What we have is a situation where 12 little boys and girls gave up their childhoods so that other people could have the freedom to be educated wherever they wanted to," says Kendra Hamilton, a former city councilor who helped organize a commemoration ceremony on the Downtown Mall for Friday's anniversary.

After taking in the speeches and exhibits at the ceremony, School Board Chair Ned Michie said he couldn't imagine what his predecessors were thinking.

"It's just incomprehensible that anybody, a reasonable person, would think [massive resistance] was the proper thing to do," Michie explained. "From our vantage point today I don't understand it."

Officials with the Albemarle-Charlottesville Historical Society, say the integration battle is one of the most popular research topics for today's students.

"I would say generally as many as four...five, six people per month come who are interested in this topic," Society librarian Margaret O'Bryant estimates.

On this somber anniversary, many hope a look back at the city's unconscionable actions could help pave the way for a brighter future.

"It's not a celebration, it's a commemoration. That literally means 'remember together,'" Hamilton explains. "If we don't remember even the painful events of the past together, we're never going to be able to build a common culture."

Those two schools shut down in September 1958, then re-opened to whites only the following February. In the meantime, some parents sent their kids to segregated private schools, while others opted for home-schooling.

Lane and Venable were finally opened to all students at the start of the 1959 school year.