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EGACY Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow.
WEDNESDAYS • Oct. 5, 2016
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INSIDE Focus on Va.’s role in Nov. 8 election - 3 Managing pain and opiod additions for blacks - 6 Terror in NY & holes in Virginia’s ID system- 9 Hope after racist vandalism in NoVa. school - 10
Richmond & Hampton Roads
LEGACYNEWSPAPER.COM • FREE
The hurt runs deep
Key town in civil rights movement hosts VP debate STEVE BARAGONA FARMVILLE (VOA) — The battle to succeed the nation’s first black president arrived this week in Farmville, one of the towns where the modern civil rights movement began. A student strike in 1951 helped bring an end to racial segregation in public education. The vice presidential debate at Farmville’s Longwood University took place as racial tensions are in the headlines over a string of police shootings of unarmed black men. Many in Farmville hope to use the town’s turbulent history as a source of strength to cope with the present strains. It won’t be easy. The hurt runs deep. The people’s vote Farmville’s Main Street -- and there is really only one main street in the tiny town -- runs past the classic tiny diner, the barber shop, a string of antiques stores, and a courthouse that belongs in a Norman Rockwell painting. Commonwealth’s Attorney Megan Clark’s office is in that picture-postcard courthouse. She is the first African American chief prosecutor in Prince Edward County, where Farmville is the county seat. But she says she never ran on her race. “Some people would go into the dialogue with me of, ‘Oh, are you trying to get the black vote?’ I’m like, ‘Nope, I’m trying to get the people’s vote,’” Clark says. “I’m not going to go down that path.” Some comments were more hurtful. She says she was told there were enough people of color in elected positions and she should wait her turn. Those remarks are the echoes of segregationist rhetoric that Rev. J. Samuel Williams, Jr. lived with daily, growing up in segregated Virginia in the 1940s and ‘50s. But it was his high school class that began to change the conversation.
Rev. J. Samuel Williams, Jr., who joined the 1951 student strike that helped end school segregation, said a prayer at the swearing-in ceremony for Megan Clark, Prince William County's first African American chief prosecutor. Williams, who joined the 1951 student strike that helped end school segregation, said a prayer at the swearing-in ceremony for Clark in her history making run for office. Williams was president of the class of 1952 at blacks-only Robert Russa Moton High School. The school was built for 180 students. When Williams attended, there were more than 400. Some classes were taught in tarpaper shacks that were cold in the winter and hot in the summer. Whites-only Farmville High School had a gymnasium, a cafeteria, a teachers lounge. Moton
had none of them. The textbooks Moton students used were hand-me-downs from the white school, often with missing pages and racial slurs written in them. Even Moton’s football equipment was secondhand. “When uniforms came to us, that meant the white high school had just gotten [new] uniforms.” His team would “go through a pile and pick out a number,” Williams says.
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