SLIDESHOW: Virginia Civil Rights Memorial

As a soldier and a diplomat, Samuel V. Wilson has tried to explain in three languages -- Russian, German and French -- just what happened to the public schools in his home county in rural Virginia.

"I may have been away, ladies and gentleman, but I was on the spot," said Wilson, recalling uncomfortable queries from foreign officials about schools shuttered in Prince Edward County from 1959 until 1964 in defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1954 banning segregated public education.

"I did not give the answers, and it has haunted me ever since," said Wilson, former president of Hampden-Sydney College, an all-male school in Prince Edward. "I did not have good answers. But how can you have good answers to a bad situation?"

More than a half-century later, as the state readies to commemorate the struggle of black students in Prince Edward with the dedication today on Capitol Square of the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial, Wilson and more than a dozen others wrestled with the aftermath of school segregation in a discussion at the Library of Virginia.

While the panelists agreed that the death of "separate-but-equal" schools often has meant more public money for education, classrooms are beset by new problems: students from singleor surrogate-parent homes, the absence of mentors for children and frequent violence.

Some of those students end up in the courtroom of Judge Jerrauld C. Jones of Norfolk Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court.

Jones, a former member of the House of Delegates, said such students are in "extreme crisis," adding, "the public schools are a stage where many of those problems are played out."

Jones' educational journey led him from the segregated classrooms of Norfolk to a boarding school in Lynchburg, Princeton University and Washington and Lee University Law School. He was the first black clerk to a justice of the Virginia Supreme Court.

Cynthia Johnson, a teacher in Prince Edward who left the county to complete her education, said that in dismantling segregation, "we have lost something along the way."

That includes, Johnson said, black teachers as positive role models for black students.

Andrew Heidelberg, a banker who was among the first blacks to attend a previously all-white Norfolk high school, agreed. These teachers, he said, provided, particularly for black males, "a certain amount of nurturing and discipline." Heidelberg added, "That part is gone."

Edward L. Ayers, the Tennessee-born president of the University of Richmond and an authority on the cultural history of the South, said that equality is a relatively new concept to a region racially divided for centuries.

"We've lived in a post-segregationist moment . . . for only a sliver of time," Ayers said.

More than 400 people -- of all races -- attended the symposium, "From Struggle to Triumph to Tomorrow." An overflow crowd of at least 100 watched the discussion on a closed-circuit television.

The event included a reading by Nikki Giovanni, a poet and professor at Virginia Tech. In her piece, Giovanni recalled a spirit of community within black America, reminiscing about a train trip into the South and how black porters looked out for black female passengers as if they were kin.

Giovanni, however, wove through her poem pointed words for black conservatives, referring to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as a "poster boy for the lawn jockeys" and commentator Armstrong Williams as a "pitiful little dumb bunny."

The privately financed, $2.6 million civil-rights monument, juxtaposed with those commemorating Colonial and Civil War figures, honors a group of black students in Prince Edward who went on strike in 1951 to protest their dilapidated high school.

A lawsuit challenging conditions in the Southside school was folded into a Kansas case, Brown v. Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court ushered in integrated classrooms by reversing an 1896 decision affirming segregation.
Contact Jeff E. Schapiro at (804) 649-6814 or jschapiro@timesdispatch.com.