Profiles in1962 Courage: Integrating Loudoun’s Public Schools

Profiles in1962 Courage: Integrating Loudoun’s Public Schools

Father Albert Pereira played a vital role in the desegregation of Middleburg’s businesses and the Loudoun County School system.

By Eugene Scheel

This new year marks the 60th anniversary of Black and White students learning together in the same Loudoun County public school classrooms.

It happened in 1962 because two men of dissimilar backgrounds objected to Black citizens being relegated to second-class status.

William McKinley Jackson, head of the Loudoun NAACP and Father Albert Pereira, priest of three Catholic Churches, St. John the Apostle, Leesburg; St. Francis de Sales, Purcellville; and a fledgling congregation that met at the new Middleburg Community Center (MCC).

(At Middleburg there often were more gapers than worshippers because President John F. Kennedy and family attended Sunday mass there. Their weekend Middleburg retreat was at Glen-Ora farm.)

One never referred to William McKinley Jackson as “Will” or “‘Bill.” He was “Mr. Jackson” and actually preferred the full name. Tall and lanky, and comfortable in work clothes, Mr. Jackson was a builder, on his own since 1944, and named for the last president to have fought in the Civil War.

Mr. Jackson’s father had worked for President McKinley, and told him his son, born in 1900, would have McKinley as a middle name. President McKinley reportedly had always been more than fair to his African-American workers, including two from Middleburg. And William McKinley Jackson vowed to work for the betterment of his race in ways unthinkable before the close of World War II in 1945. That year Mr. Jackson began his 25 years as NAACP president.

Albert Pereira was Portuguese and educated in the best European schools. In an interview decades ago, he told this writer he was in a taxi in Vienna the night of March 11, 1938, when Nazis terrorized the Jewish section as Austrian police watched and did nothing. He sent off a letter to The New York Times, but it never was printed.

Later, he berated several Nazis of his own age for their treatment of Jews. One countered with words Father Pereira vividly recalled forty years later: “I have been four years to your Southland, and what we do to Jews is no worse than what you do to Negroes.”

From that day on, he vowed to correct the situation. In early March, 1940 he sailed to the U.S. on the Conte de Savoia, one of the last passenger ships to leave Europe, and soon began his pastoring in Virginia.

Father Pereira’s first assignment ended after he welcomed African-Americans into his Roanoke congregation. The Diocese of Richmond then encouraged the priest to seek the Lord’s guidance at Holy Cross Monastery in Clarke County.

A few weeks after the initial February 12, 1961 mass attended by President Kennedy and family at the MCC, Halle Flournoy’s lunch-counter help refused to serve two Howard University students. They then asked Mr. Jackson to help them organize a demonstration to embarrass the president.

Mr. Jackson demurred and contacted Father Pereira. They then met with town businessmen, Mayor Edwin Reamer, and the two village pharmacy owners.

“Our reception was a lukewarm one,” Father Periera recalled, but then Fauquier Democrat managing editor “John Eisenhard called and told me the entire Washington NAACP and Congress of Racial Equality were planning a bus cavalcade to Middleburg on the weekend the president was to receive mass.”

John W. LaVall, Mr. Jackson’s pastor at Shiloh Baptist, agreed with Jackson that it was imperative not to embarrass the president. They convinced the Bradfield and Flournoy drugstore owners to serve African-Americans.

A call from Mr. Jackson to the D.C. groups informed them the two businesses were now serving everyone. That Saturday, April 9, 1961, two Howard University students sipped Cokes at the Bradfield and Flournoy lunch counters.

The segregated MCC, built at a cost of more than $600,000 in 1948, continued to rankle Mr. Jackson. In 1951, a “New Colored Center,” the two-room Grant School, with an outdoor basketball court, opened at a total cost of $58,721.

The MCC had a public swimming pool—the White public. On hot summer nights, some Black children occasionally climbed the fence for a midnight or early-morning swim. Howell Jackson, spokesperson for the MCC, called Mr. Jackson and accused him of “putting them up to it.”

“I didn’t, but wish I did,” Mr. Jackson recalled. He then reminded Howell Jackson that some government funds were used to build the MCC and suggested they have a meeting to discuss the issue of desegregating the facility, with a lawyer present to record the terms.

Howell Jackson agreed to desegregate as soon as Loudoun County desegregated its public schools, an improbable possibility to Howell Jackson’s way of thinking. After all, in August, 1956, Loudoun’s board of supervisors had unanimously passed a resolution forwarded by Commonwealth’s Attorney Sterling M. Harrison.

“In the event the integration edict is imposed upon the public school system,” it read, “there will not be forthcoming any funds for the maintenance and operation of any school.”

Howell Jackson also knew that in April, 1956 the Loudoun School Board had refused the request of African-American teachers to hold their Douglass High School graduation exercises at the new Loudoun County High School auditorium.

Father Pereira had told Mr. Jackson that he doubted the board of supervisor’s threats would hold up in court. Indeed, in 1959, the appointed Loudoun School Board voted to allow Black students to enter schools for Whites if the parents of the Black students came to the school board offices to get a “blue consent slip.” None did.

Together, in late winter 1962, Mr. Jackson and Father Pereira were thinking about plans to integrate the new high school in Purcellville slated to open that fall.

At the Goose Creek Friends Meetinghouse in Lincoln, they met with a group of concerned women, several of them Quakers and each strongly believing that children of all races should be learning together.

A few months later, a new board of supervisors decision raised hopes. On July 16, 1962, Waterford farmer and board member James E. Arnold voiced Father Pereira’s thoughts, and he persuaded the board by a 4-1 vote to rescind its 1956 edict that would close public schools.

By that date Mr. Jackson, Father Pereira and the Lincoln ladies had decided that given the broad scope of what they were planning, only the brightest Black students would initially integrate the school.

Eight years had passed since the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to integrate American schools “with all deliberate speed.” Loudoun public-school officials had done nothing save for authorizing the blue consent slip.

So the Lincoln group turned to Mr. Jackson, and he began contacting Black parents in the Loudoun Valley. Might they want their children at the new high school? Most were not sure. But after a few weeks, he had some positive replies.

Father Pereira spoke with St. Francis de Sales’ venerable black parishioner, Helen Lee Gross, and she also began canvassing Black areas of the county. She also received favorable replies.

Somehow, the news leaked out that on September 4, when the new Loudoun Valley High School opened, Black children would be among those entering.

On radio broadcaster Frank Orrison’s Newsbeat show, his booming bass voice announced: “They’re integrating the new high school in Purcellville. I don’t know if you’re going to be there, but I’m going to be there.”

Father Pereira recalled that he “nearly went through the roof,” when he heard those words, concerned there might be potentially violent protests. But the school opening was uneventful. No local newspaper made mention of it, nor did Peggy Drummond’s “Lines from Loudoun,” the popular African- American social column in the Loudoun Times-Mirror.

The school’s first yearbook, the Loudoun Valley Leif, pictured two African-American students and 613 white students. The 1963-1964 yearbook, now named Saga, pictured 31 black students. The National Honor Society welcomed four, among them a Black school valedictorian George Allan Brown.