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By Eugene Scheel
Sunday, May 21, 2000; Page V03

It was this time of year--twice--when the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education. The first decision, on May 17, 1954, ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. The second, on May 31, 1955, ordered integration to proceed "with all deliberate speed" but nearly canceled itself by setting no deadline and effectively placing the burden of how to do it on the NAACP, whose lawyers had argued the case.

Two of those lawyers, Thurgood Marshall and Oliver W. Hill, had civil rights roots in Loudoun County. And their mentor was Charles Hamilton Houston, a Washington lawyer who used his gift of language to mobilize Loudoun's black community from 1933 until his death at 54 in 1950. "There's no question that Houston would have argued Brown if he had lived," Hill told me last week. "He had tried all the precedents."

Marshall had argued Brown when it first arrived at the Supreme Court and again when the court considered how its initial ruling should be carried out. As a Howard University law student in 1933, Marshall had assisted Houston in gaining a life sentence--rather than the electric chair--for an itinerant black laborer convicted of murder in a Middleburg case. Marshall said the case showed him that a superior black lawyer could achieve a just verdict in the South, and he shifted his focus from corporate law to civil rights law, graduating first in his class.

Hill, who graduated second in the same class, presented briefs for the plaintiffs in Brown. In Loudoun in the early '40s, Hill had represented Samuel Legions, a black man accused of rape, and Hill remembers waiting for the verdict. It was after midnight when the jurors reported that they were tired--and deadlocked. But Circuit Court Judge J.R.H. Alexander ordered them to keep at it, and within 15 minutes, they returned with a guilty verdict and imposed the death penalty.

Hill took the case to the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, which found the evidence against Legions "inherently incredible" and quashed the verdict.

Loudoun newspapers reported the initial Brown v. Board decision on Page 1. Purcellville's Blue Ridge Herald quoted School Superintendent Oscar L. Emerick as saying, "We're not even thinking about possible action when Virginia law requires separate but equal facilities."

The minutes of neither the School Board nor the Board of Supervisors mention the event, for in those days race was generally omitted from the minutes when it might be unpleasant to the majority.

The editor of the Loudoun Times-Mirror wrote that the 1954 Brown decision "is more ideological than practical. It smacks to us of outside interests dictating to the South which never has tried to dictate to them." He called on Loudouners to rely on "studious thinking" but to "prepare for future eventualities."

Editorials of that era were geared to please the majority but be respectful of the minority.

As an outgrowth of the initial decision in Brown, proponents of segregation organized the Loudoun chapter of the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties, which claimed 150 members. Its local president was Commonwealth's Attorney Sterling M. Harrison, a husky Marine Corps veteran who kept a hound dog in his office. "I'm against every 'ism' except constitutionalism," he used to say.

Harrison, was, perhaps, the most powerful political figure in Loudoun--except perhaps Howard Worth "Judge" Smith, of little Georgetown in Fauquier. Smith was a congressman and chairman of the House Rules Committee. He, too, was a strong supporter of the Loudoun Defenders.

Thus, it was not surprising that Harrison should appear before the Board of Supervisors in August 1956 with the following resolve: "That in the event the integration edict is imposed upon the public school system, there will not be forthcoming any funds for the maintenance and operation of any school." The board passed the resolution unanimously.

At that time, there were two county high schools, both in Leesburg: Douglass for blacks and Loudoun County for whites. At Douglass, the Class of 1956 numbered 41 students, the largest senior class in the school's 15 years, and they wanted to use the new auditorium at Loudoun County High, built in 1954, for their graduation. John Tolbert, speaking for the County-Wide League, a union of the black schools' PTAs, asked the School Board for permission.

"This request was refused," noted the board minutes.

In summer 1956, however, the Loudoun Defenders had no trouble obtaining permission to use the same auditorium for its meeting, attended by more than 300 people. Their request was not mentioned in School Board minutes.

Judge John J. Parker, a 30-year veteran of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which included Virginia, interpreted the 1954 decision as "a case of an individual's right," according to Hill. "People had to apply individually, just as [the plaintiff] Oliver Brown had applied."

This doctrine of "individual right," Hill noted, led to Virginia's policy of requiring that every black student who wanted to enter a white school fill out a form and send it to the School Board. The board then sent the form to the State Pupil Placement Board in Richmond, which decided whether to admit the student to a white school. Usually, as was the case in Loudoun, only the brightest black students were allowed to cross the color line.

By June 1962, Loudoun's School Board had sent the applications of 12 black students, plus data on their grades and deportment, to the placement board, and on June 22 received word from the board that one student could enter Loudoun County High School and that three could enter Loudoun Valley High School, which was due to open that fall.

In July, with the reality of integration upon them, the Board of Supervisors voted 4 to 1 to rescind its August 1956 resolution to withhold school funds.

The Times-Mirror, the one surviving countywide newspaper, did not mention the initial integration when school opened Sept. 4. But Frank Orrison, of WAGE radio's "Loudoun Newsbeat" program, a 6 a.m. fixture, intoned in his booming basso words that some longtime residents vaguely recall: "They're going to integrate the new high school in Purcellville today. Are y'all going to be there? I certainly am."

Few turned out, and at 8:30 a.m., Linda Lee Jackson, Edith Mae Smith and Louis Edward Woodson, all juniors, calmly entered Loudoun Valley High School. At the same time, sophomore Helen Marie Ramey peacefully walked into Loudoun County High School. The county was now among the 3 percent of southern jurisdictions that had partially integrated in the eight years that had elapsed since the first decision.

A week later, the eight black students who had been rejected for enrollment sued the Virginia Pupil Placement Board and the Loudoun County School Board in U.S. District Court in Alexandria. As a result, black students were able to enter Loudoun County and Loudoun Valley high schools in the fall of 1963.

Of 610 Valley students that year, 23 were black. Graduating beside Jackson, Smith and Woodson were Larry L. King, Lawrence Henry King, Mildred Patricia Ann Lane and Larry William Summers. Of 623 students at Loudoun County High, 10 were black. Graduating were Eugene Ashton and Barry Middleton.

Whether by coincidence or otherwise, Loudoun County High's 1964 yearbook, "Lord Loudoun," displayed on its cover, for the first and only time, a bas-relief rebel soldier on horseback, waving the Confederate battle flag.

Many accounts of those first two terms, from teachers and students alike, describe a serene transition. Not that there weren't isolated incidents. Joyce Jackson, who enrolled at County in the fall of '63, told me that she was told in no uncertain terms to go home and that the order was accompanied by an ugly racial epithet. Larry Simms, who matriculated at Valley that fall, related that two very dark-skinned and overweight students endured ridicule.

But in general, black students at Valley had an easier time of it. The school was new, and the upper part of the county had, in part, the Quaker tradition of acceptance. David Chamberlin, president of the junior class in '62-63, expressed a universal feeling that "we all felt liberated, even the whites. We had come from Loudoun County High where there were cliques--Leesburg considered itself the top of the county. That all was broken down."

Besides, students and teachers at Loudoun Valley High had other things to worry about. Oliver Trumbo, the vice principal, recalled: "The lawn was a dust bowl, the cafeteria was not finished until spring and the auditorium's concrete floor had to be repoured when it cracked because of too much heat." Pat Shoaf, the art and English teacher, said: "The school was literally built around us. We breathed asbestos dust all year. We were concerned with survival."

Trumbo, who had taught at Loudoun County High and would later become its principal, summed up the integration years: "The Lord blessed us by putting calm hands in control."

But because Loudoun's school-age population was 15 percent black in the mid-1960s, integration was proceeding too slowly for U.S. District Court Judge Oren R. Lewis, and in August 1965, the Justice Department brought suit against the School Board "for still operating on a dual school system." He ordered all Loudoun schools to be integrated "on both pupil and staff levels no later than the 1968-69 school year."

Trumbo reminisced, with some amusement, that Clarence Bussinger, school superintendent since 1957, would arrive at a principals' meeting and say woefully, "Had a spell with Oren Lewis again."

"I'm not sure Bussinger became a believer," Trumbo added, "but Lewis sure tried."

After years of inaction, in April 1967, Loudoun's NAACP called for "integration at all levels--students, teachers, and bus drivers." The League of Women Voters also released its three-year study of education in Loudoun, calling for "complete and permanent desegregation"--and for increases in teacher salaries.

When the 1967-68 term began, school buses were desegregated. But two-thirds of all black pupils still attended segregated schools, and that margin would remain until May, when the last classes graduated from all-black Douglass High School and Banneker, Carver and Douglass elementary schools. The commencement theme at Douglass was "A Past to be Proud Of." My wife, Annette Scheel, was the first full-time teacher to break the color barrier when she was hired to teach reading at Douglass.

The last barriers were breached during the fall and winter months of Lewis's deadline school term, 1968-69. It was 15 years after Brown v. Board of Education that the county's public schools functioned as one entity.

Eugene Scheel is a Waterford historian and mapmaker.

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