This story has been updated to reflect a correction. Prince Edward County Schools closed between 1959 and 1964.
It’s been 57 years, but Sharon McGlone still remembers that first day at Robert E. Lee Elementary School in Spotsylvania.
The then fourth-grader and six other girls had prepared all summer for taking their first steps into the county’s two previously all-white schools.
It stung, still, when a boy that morning told her his mother said he couldn’t play with her and used the n-word. The teacher stepped in. She told him that she would not tolerate that language in her classroom.
“I remember thinking,’ McGlone recalled recently, “I have one person in this school looking after me.”
McGlone, now a retired educator living in Norfolk, will discuss how being a young and innocent pioneer helped mold her life during a virtual talk Saturday by the League of Women Voters of South Hampton Roads. The presentation, “The Girls Who Brought the Walls Down and the Walls that Remain,” is free and will begin at 11 a.m.
The event was originally planned for March but was rescheduled due to the pandemic. But the events of the summer have made the conversation more germane, McGlone said. In particular, quarantining forced students to learn from home and it illuminated the educational gaps that exist along race and class lines. News reports showed that poor and minority families disproportionately didn’t have the technology and support at home to make online learning an adequate option.
“I want to share my story about the ‘walls’ in education that were taken down 57 years ago, and encourage the conversation of ‘walls’ that still remain,” said McGlone, who is a member of the LWV. “Since March, many ‘walls’ that remain have been exposed.”
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Virginia fought for years to keep African American and white students separate even after the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that separate schools were inherently unequal. The state closed six Norfolk public schools for five months and only opened them in February 1959 after being sued. Prince Edward County Schools, two hours south of Spotsylvania, shut all of its schools for five years before desegregating them in 1964. Spotsylvania finally relented in 1963.
McGlone’s father was in the military, which had desegregated after World War II. He’d traveled and saw that African American and white students could study in the same classrooms just fine. Other military families were some of the first who were selected to help desegregate Spotsylvania County Schools.
“It was an effort to select the parents who were willing and at that point those parents told us it wasn’t a question for us,” McGlone said.
Military families also had job security that other families did not have. It was not uncommon for African American parents to have their paychecks threatened by white employers if they dared send their children to white schools.
The change wasn’t easy though.
McGlone had been going to the all-Black John J. Wright Consolidated School, like most of her family had. Her great-grandfather actually helped build the school.
“It was an extension of your family,” she said, “Immediately we were taken from that. We lost that security.”
Years later, though, several of the people who stayed at the school scoffed at McGlone for leaving, treating her as if “I thought I was better than them.”
“There was a bully at John J. Wright just like there was a bully at Robert E. Lee,” McGlone said. “Integrity has no color.”
She was told that the cause was bigger than her. And them.
“There was a feeling of loneliness, but also the feeling of responsibility,” she said. “I remember realizing that it was a big thing. As a 9-year-old, I do remember being told, ‘You show them you are as smart.’ In making sure that there was equity across the board, the only way you’re going to do that is if all kids are exposed to the same thing.”
Of that pioneering group were seven girls — two 11th-graders, one eighth-grader, and four fourth-graders. Two boys were part of the plan but they were pulled before school began. McGlone said she was never told why.
“We can only maybe infer that it was easier for us to turn the other cheek,” she said. “It was easier as girls to ignore what was happening.”
The girls tried to pretend they didn’t hear the name-calling or not feel embarrassed when white students would not talk to them.
McGlone remembers getting excited about a field trip to Jamestown. Her former school never had the money for trips. Her teacher created a seating chart for the bus and allowed students to sit where they wanted. No one wrote their name next to McGlone’s. Then one white girl did.
During the trip, the two girls talked about trading lunches. McGlone swapped her chicken sandwich and pound cake for a peanut butter and banana sandwich, which she’d never had before. But she tried it.
“And I still like them,” she said. “But that is the importance of integration. It allows you to go beyond your cultural boundaries.”
Her family moved regularly with her father’s duty stations. It moved to Hampton Roads at one point. McGlone attended schools in Williamsburg and Newport News before the family eventually moved back to Spotsylvania where McGlone graduated from high school in 1972. McGlone graduated from Old Dominion University, met her future husband there, and went into a career of social work and education. McGlone retired from Norfolk Public Schools as an instructional technology specialist in 2019.
She continues to lecture about her life because the lessons are still relevant, she said.
“We are now old enough and brave enough to say we’re tired of being the first,” she said. “There are many times, still, that I have been the lone person of color on a committee, at a music concert, movie theater, etcetera. I notice it, but also am assured that I belong in the room.”
To RSVP for Saturday’s event, send an email to SHRLeague@gmail.com with Subject: “Girls Who Brought The Walls Down” for login directions.
Denise M. Watson, 757-446-2504,denise.watson@pilotonline.com
