A historical marker for C. E. Abrams school is located on the grounds of Fluvanna Middle School in central Virginia, on route 76 between Richmond and Charlottesville. Currently the location for Abrams Alternative Academy, this school building provided high school education to African American pupils in the county for thirty years during the era of segregation. In the decades before this school opened in 1936, African American boys and girls had to leave the county to attend high school because they were legally barred from the white school. From 1936 until 1969, the Abrams school, named for a prominent educator and minister, educated African American pupils in a separate school. During these thirty five years in Virginia, African American pupils, parents, and community leaders, with the support of civil rights organizations, fought for the right to attend integrated schools. Virginia’s white establishment, including local school boards, almost all newspapers, and particularly the state government resisted these efforts. These efforts failed, and all Virginia schools, including elementary, middle, and high schools in Fluvanna County, were integrated in the 1960s. In recent years, the history of African American education in the twentieth century has been remembered with museum exhibits and historical markers, including the sign for C. E. Abrams school visible from the main road. This episode explores this history of race and education with particular attention to sites along Route 76 across Virginia where memories of schooling and the implications of segregation are being preserved for the public.
Welcome to episode 11 of the Virginia Bikecentennial Route 76 Podcast. This episode is connected to Fluvanna County, located just under 200 miles from Yorktown, the starting point for the westbound route, and just about 350 miles from the Kentucky border, where eastbound riders enter Virginia. This podcast is a production of Virginia Tech, a public land grant university located in Blacksburg, just three miles from Route 76 in southwest Virginia. I am your host, Tom Ewing, and this podcast is produced by the digital humanities program in Virginia Tech University Libraries, under the direction of media manager Joe Forte.
Virginia’s system of public education was segregated for nearly a century, from the first schools for African American pupils after the Civil War through the period of forced integration in the 1960s. Segregation began in the practice of schooling, as primary schools for the children of freed slaves were established across the state. These schools usually originated in the community, as families or churches volunteered the use of rooms and raised funds to hire teachers. In the decades after the Civil War, outside support for African American schools was provided by the Federal Freedman’s Bureau and private philanthropic organizations from northern states.
Separate schooling in practice was legally codified for the entire state with the adoption of the 1902 Constitution, which declared segregation of all public facilities, including schools. As a result of this legal change, African American pupils who attempted to attend white schools could be legally prevented from even entering the school. At the same time, white school officials who may have wanted to educate African American pupils were legally prevented from admitting any students other than those designated as white.
During the early twentieth century, the number of African American pupils enrolled in public schools grew rapidly. Elementary schooling was widely available, although the facilities were usually inferior and pupils often had to travel much longer distances compared to their white peers. While high schools for African American pupils were created in most cities and more populous counties, smaller counties often did not create high schools for their African American population. Fluvanna County, the subject of this episode, did not provide a high school for African American pupils until 1936, which meant these students had to leave the county to attend high school. Based on population records from the 1930 US Census, an estimated 350 African American pupils were high school age. All of these pupils, who made up 42% of the county’s high school-aged population, were legally barred from Fluvanna high school and had to leave the county to attend high school.
Three important trends in the history of Virginia public schools began in the 1930s and continued after world war two. First, the number of schools for African American pupils increased considerably. The establishment of Abrams High School in Fluvanna was one example of this broader trend across the state. More African American pupils continued their education beyond the elementary level and thus enrollment surged in segregated high schools.
The second trend was the beginning of legal challenges to segregation, including separate schools. This effort was led by civil rights organizations, particularly the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, founded in 1940 by Thurgood Marshall. This legal campaign had an early success when the courts upheld a legal case that White and African American teachers in Norfolk receive the same pay based on qualifications and experience. While pupils, parents, and community leaders could petition and protest at the local level, the ban on integrated schools in the Virginia constitution ensured that school boards, principals, and county governments could safely ignore these requests with the justification that they were only following state law.
The third trend was the effort by the Virginia Department of Education to pretend that separate schools could also be equal schools, thus fulfilling the false promise legitimized by the US Supreme Court’s decision, Plessy versus Ferguson, upholding segregation in public institutions. In many locations across Virginia, new buildings for African American pupils were established in the late 1940s as part of a deliberate, and remarkably cynical, effort to improve separate schools just enough to undermine protests about inadequate separate schools. In other words, the expansion and improvement of Black schools across Virginia was part of a coordinated effort to resist integration, thus perpetuating the inadequate education available to African American pupils.
These trends converged in the steps leading to the Brown vs Board of Education Supreme Court decision in May 1954. The growing number of African American pupils in Virginia schools, the support provided by civil rights organizations, and the obvious failure to provide equal education in separate schools led to the successful legal campaign to challenge school segregation. Virginia’s African American pupils, parents, and community organizations were important participants in this effort, as the legal case prompted by the walkout from schools in Farmville became one of the cases that led to the Brown decision.
Virginia’s white establishment greeted the Brown decision with dismay, outrage, and determination to resist implementation. Virginia’s government promised “massive resistance” to the Supreme Court’s edict that public schools must be desegregated. This resistance took many forms across the state. The most extreme response was to close all the public schools rather than allow any African American pupils to attend an integrated school. Other districts delayed implementation as long as possible. Only a few districts managed to achieve integration relatively quickly and with little disruption. These districts included the suburbs around Washington DC and rural communities, particularly in Appalachia, with relatively few African American pupils. In 1959, the federal courts rejected the remainders of segregated schools in Virginia and ordered that African American students be admitted to previously white schools. Resistance continued at the local level, with delays and obstructions that made it difficult and even dangerous for African American boys and girls to enter integrated schools. The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act enabled the federal government to become more active in pushing integration, and these steps accelerated the pace of desegregation.
Integration, as ordered by the Supreme Court and implemented despite massive resistance, achieved one of the most persistent goals of African American communities in Virginia. Yet this change brought consequences that further marginalized already vulnerable African American communities. In the era of segregation, African American teachers and principals acquired an important role in communities, as their advanced education, professional status, and public visibility ensured that they had an influential role in society. Teaching was one of the few occupations for educated and professional African American women, whose position was often constrained by factors of race and gender. One consequence of desegregation was the widespread dismissal of African American teachers from the public schools. The reason was often pure racism: white school leaders and parents did not want African American teachers in positions of professional authority relative to white children. African American teachers and principals dismissed from their positions in Black schools either found lower ranking positions in integrated schools or, more likely, left the district or the state in order to find new employment. As a result of integration, an entire generation of African American professional educators was lost to many communities.
The historical marker for Abrams school along Route 76 in Fluvanna county illustrates how these themes in Virginia’s history evolved in this community. The establishment of Abrams High School in 1936 responded to the growing demand in African American communities for more advanced schooling opportunities, the prominent role of educational and religious leaders within these communities, and willingness by school boards to create schools as long as they remained rigidly segregated. The single sentence on the marker, that Abrams High School became a junior high school after integration in the 1960s, fails to acknowledge the actual history of integration in Virginia, including massive resistance that openly defied the US Supreme Court.
A deeper appreciation of the complex history of race and education is possible now through museums and historical markers across Virginia, many of which are also located on or near Route 76.
In Williamsburg, a historical marker on the campus of The College of William and Mary recognizes the location of the Bray School, which educated the children of free and enslaved African Americans in the late eighteenth century. The school was led by Anne Wager and educated children for fourteen years until it was closed in 1774.
In Henrico, just east of Richmond, a historical marker recognizes the Chatsworth School, built in 1915 for African American children. Henrico county had twenty schools for African American pupils during the era of segregation.
The most extensive collection of historical records about segregation and integration is found in the Robert Russa Moton Museum, south of Richmond, in the community of Farmville where pupils protested unequal conditions in the early 1950s.
In Fluvanna county, not far from the Abrams historical marker, efforts are underway to restore the New Fork Schoolhouse, which educated African American children in the 1930s.
In downtown Lexington, just a few blocks from Route 76, a marker records the history of Lylburn Downing School, established by African American community leaders in the 1920s to provide first elementary and then secondary education. The school was named for Lylburn Downing, born into slavery during the Civil War, who attended Lincoln University and served as a pastor and community leader in the early twentieth century.
The Booker T. Washington National Monument, located 10 miles southeast of Troutville, commemorates the birthplace of America’s earliest and most famous advocate for industrial education for African American pupils.
In Christiansburg, exhibit boards near the old post office provide documentation of several primary schools in the New River Valley established for African American children, including the Hill School, established in 1885, now just a few blocks from Route 76.
In Pulaski, just north of Route 76, the Calfee Community and Cultural Center is located in the historical building of the Calfee Training School, established in 1894 to provide trades education to African American youth. In the late 1930s, Principal Chauncey Depew Harmon, a graduate of Tuskegee Institute, consulted with Thurgood Marshall for legal assistance in challenging separate but equal schooling. In 1938, the Calfee Training School was completely destroyed in a fire. Rather than build a new high school for African American children, the county school board paid for them to travel more than an hour by bus to attend the Christiansburg Institute. In the late 1940s, teachers and pupils in Pulaski sued the School Board over the unequal conditions in schools. This case was successful, and contributed to the accumulation of legal findings that led to the Supreme Court decision in 1954.
The Wytheville Training School marker, just blocks from Route 76, recognizes a history of African American education that began with the first school for children of emancipated slaves in 1867. Fifteen years later, in 1883, the Wytheville Training School offered industrial and crafts education to the community. By the 1940s, this school provided high school education to African American children from Wythe county and three other counties in the region: Bland, Carroll, and Grayson.
Cyclists along Route 76 now will see a very different set of historical markers compared to those cycling along the Bikecentennial Route in 1976. According to the Department of Historical Resources, more than 700 historical markers were placed along Virginia’s roads in the decades prior to 1930. Of these 700 markers, only three, less than 1%, addressed any aspect of Black history. One-third of these markers commemorated civil war battles, camps, or commanders. By comparison, nearly two-thirds of the markers established after 2019 featured some aspect of Black history. Fifty years ago, cyclists along the Bikecentennial route could have learned a lot about Virginia in the revolutionary era, the civil war, and westward expansion (with almost no reference to the murder and displacement native Americans). Now cyclists who take time to read historical markers, either along the route or in nearby locations, have opportunities to learn about African American historical events, leaders, and organizations in ways that reflect a changing perspective on the past, present, and future.
You have been listening to episode 11 of the Virginia Bikecentennial Route 76 Podcast. This episode is connected to Fluvanna County, located just under 200 miles from Yorktown, the starting point for the westbound route, and just about 350 miles from the Kentucky border, where eastbound riders enter Virginia. This podcast is a production of Virginia Tech, a public land grant university located in Blacksburg, just three miles from Route 76 in southwest Virginia. I am your host, Tom Ewing, and this podcast is produced by the digital humanities program in Virginia Tech University Libraries, under the direction of media manager Joe Forte. To learn more about the stories in this episode, visit our website or follow us on social media, all accessible from the homepage for this podcast.
