Newsletter of the Society for the History of Children and Youth
Number 4 | Summer 2004 |
| Youngest Combatants of the Second Civil War: Black Children on the Front Lines of Public School Desegregation Part 4: Betty Ann Kilby, Warren County, Virginia Betty Ann Kilby was nine years old when the Brown decision was handed down. Her two older siblings were ten-year-old John and twelve-year-old James. All were in elementary school, and they continued to attend a black school near their home in western Virginia through the seventh grade. When each graduated from the elementary school, Warren County still had only one high school, and black students could not enroll there. The state of Virginia had responded to the decisions in Brown by enacting Massive Resistance legislation, according to which any school that desegregated would be immediately shut down. In accordance with a companion law, Betty’s father, James Wilson Kilby, signed a “pupil placement” form in 1956 as James was finishing the seventh grade, so young James could attend the all-black Manassas Regional High School (the only option made available on the form), located sixty miles away in Prince William County and requiring that James board there and return home only on weekends. The following year, John finished grade seven, and Mr. Kilby insisted that the Johnson-Williams school in Berryville, thirty miles away, be made an option on the pupil placement form. The days would be long, but his children would return home each night. So the two boys began attending the Berryville school, and Betty figured she would begin attending that school with her brothers in 1958. That did not happen. In spring 1958, thirteen-year-old Betty Kilby brought her pupil placement form home for her father to sign. He scratched out the only options listed, the Manassas school and the Berryville school, and wrote in “Warren County High School.” Her teacher rejected the form filled out in that fashion; she rejected Mr. Kilby’s second version with the same content; and someone from the school board phoned him at home after he did the same thing a third time. Years later, Betty recalled the exasperated words he spoke into the phone that evening in May 1958:
Later that evening, she heard him tell her mother, “Catherine, get ready for a fight because Betty ain’t going to Manassas or Berryville, she is going to Warren County High School. Don’t you remember what Rev. Frank said about separate not being equal? Besides, we are not alone. John Jackson is going to turn in a form tomorrow to send his daughter Barbara to WCHS too.” On behalf of his daughter Betty, so she could go to school in her home county, Mr. Kilby went to court. Much of the summer was taken up with action in federal district court in Harrisonburg, Virginia. A story in the paper that summer that led to a phone conversation with Barbara that, as Betty remembered it years later, went like this:
As for white residents of the county, they began to ponder the possibilities. One white woman mused, “I am in favor of separate schools but the main concern now is to keep the schools open.” On that score, she and her white neighbors had no more say than did the Kilby family. If the federal court ordered desegregation of Warren County High School, the governor would follow the legislature’s mandate and close the school. But the schools of Warren County did open for the 1958–1959 year, and most students returned to classes. A few children could not. James, John, and Betty Kilby had no school to go to, nor did Barbara Jackson, or some eighteen other black youngsters whose parents were taking legal action to gain admission to the local high school. Betty Kilby later remembered her sadness:
Events in September came in quick succession. The federal court ruled that Warren County could not, solely on the basis of their race, deny black students admission to the county’s only high school. The state appealed the ruling. The appeals court refused to grant a stay of the district court order while the appeals process unfolded. Classes were suspended while the black youngsters made the rounds of the school board office and the county courthouse to register for school. Betty Kilby later wrote, “Just as we were instructed, we acted as though we were small soldiers, standing tall, proud and dignified with no talking or complaining.” Meanwhile, the high school senior class president observed of his schoolmates that, left to their own devices, “I believe that most of us would integrate rather than see the school closed.” He continued: “We believe we could ignore” any black classmates “and go on as we always have.” Betty began having the same bad dream, over and over:
The desegregation order led directly to the governor’s closing Warren County High School. Within weeks, arrangements had been made to supply schooling for the county’s white youngsters. In the world of white Warren County, the teachers kept teaching, and the students kept going to school, just in different places, such as white churches. Arrangements for the twenty-two black youngsters took longer. As of December 11, they began living and attending school in Washington, D.C., where schools had been desegregated soon after the Brown decisions. As for Betty Kilby, exiled far from home, she says “I cried myself to sleep most nights.” On January 19, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that, under the state constitution, the state could not selectively close the schools, and that same day a federal court ruled that the closure violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Court wrangling continued, but on February 10, U.S. district judge John Paul ordered that Warren County High School be re-opened on February 18, this time on a desegregated basis. It was time for the Kilby children and the other plaintiffs in Betty Kilby’s lawsuit to come home. She says, “We had almost forgot that we were soldiers in the midst of war.” On the morning of February 18, Betty and her brothers headed off for classes at the Warren County High School. As they prepared to leave the house, “Momma kissed us and told the boys, ‘You stay close to your sister, you hear me.’ I could hear the fear in Momma’s voice.” At the school, “a big fat white woman” yelled, “We gonna kill all you little Niggers.” Betty started reciting the 23rd Psalm to herself. In the Kilby family, February 18 divided two epochs. Many years later, as Betty says, “Daddy talked about the day that we entered Warren County High School. Daddy admitted that he was scared as all of us children, but he couldn’t show his fear.” Inside the school, only black students took classes that first day, or at any subsequent time through the end of the school year. No white student ever stepped inside the school that winter or spring. Terror outside the school began to contrast with serene times inside. There were almost as many white teachers as black students, Betty later recounted, though they “were no more accustomed to teaching Negroes” than
But then, says Betty, “the summer ended and it was time to put on our armor and become little soldiers.” The new school year, 1958–1959, was going to be very different, as white students returned to the high school: “Our safe environment was no longer safe.” The few black students were “all spread out”; Betty had three black classmates in the eighth grade, but “I was the only Negro in most of my classes.” From the start of the new year, “We knew that it was not safe to walk the halls alone, take the short cut through the auditorium from one side of the building to the other side . . . or even go to the restroom alone.” Coached by adults and guided by their own experience, the black students learned “not to trust anyone except each other. We studied each other’s schedules to team-up as much as possible to protect each other.” And they shared information about ominous students and teachers. The teenager had a strategy, a world view, that kept her generally serene through it all. As she later explained:
Not only was the “desegregated” school a hostile environment, the school experience remained in many ways segregated—though one feature of that segregation helped out with some features of the desegregation. As Betty explains: “We continued to ride separate school buses. After school a bus picked up the Negro children at Warren County High School, drove us to Criser Combined Colored School where we would transfer to busses that transported colored children home.” The bus ride from one school to the other “gave us an opportunity to discuss what went on during the day at school.” Each year, the black students who enrolled at the high school in 1958 had to take summer classes—credited with only half a year’s study during 1958-1959, they had to make up for lost time. Back at school each fall, they found themselves excluded from many activities that their white classmates took for granted. Black adults placed enough faith in the value of black children’s attending Warren County High School to dismiss as relatively insignificant the students’ exclusion from many extracurricular features of a high school education. Betty Kilby and a black classmate, Geraldine Rhodes, tried out for majorettes but were rejected. Community adults pointed out, “It would have been nice, but you are there to get an education.” Betty’s brother John and another black student, Charles Lewis, tried out for basketball. Charles, an “outstanding” player, made the team, but then he was told that if he stayed on the team, there would be no season for him or his teammates, for no team from any other school would then agree to play Warren County, so “Charles gave up his basketball dream for a quality education.” During the 1960–1961 year, James Kilby and Frank Grier were the only black seniors. Not allowed to attend their senior prom, they were told again by their elders that they were at the school “to get an education.” The two seniors endured long enough to get to graduation, the first of the “heroes” of 1958 “to officially graduate from an integrated class.” “Besides,” says Betty, “there were larger issues.” Members of the black community found that the costs of their involvement in school desegregation kept mounting. Those costs reflected, in some ways, a displacement of the burdens of travel that black students, like Betty’s two older brothers, had borne when they had had to travel considerable distances to school. And the costs heightened the tensions children felt at home and in the community. “Our mothers couldn’t get jobs cleaning houses in Front Royal or Warren County. They had to get up at 4 AM and ride sixty miles to the Northern Virginia area for work. Our NAACP lawyers were fighting with the local Union because our fathers who worked at the Viscose [a major industrial employer in the area] were under attack and risked losing their jobs. Our farm animals were being mutilated and poisoned.” By 1962–1963, Betty’s senior year, only four of the original black students remained—Betty Kilby, Barbara Jackson, Matthew Pines, and Steven Travis—the others having graduated or given up. “Since there were so few of us left it was hard to maintain our buddy system. For the first time since 1958, I didn’t have one of my brothers in school to watch over me.” She nonetheless felt safer, grew less vigilant, and let some old rules lapse. “One day as I was crossing the auditorium alone, there were three boys hiding behind the stage. I was grabbed from behind, blindfolded, mouth taped and raped. . . . I passed out hoping that I would die.” Though plagued in the months that followed by an urge to commit suicide, she held on. A kindly black man she knew observed to her, “The best part of your life is just around the corner, God has given you a job, He will give you the strength to make it through. It was a big job for such a little girl like you but you can do it.” She graduated. She could not attend her prom. On graduation night, “as my [white female] classmates hugged and kissed, there were no hugs for me. I hugged myself and looked toward heaven and whispered, ‘thank you.’ Wallenstein Home Part 5: Ruth Carter and her Siblings in Mississippi
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