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Two Brave Men Honored as Civil Rights Stalwarts
This article by Emma Boyce originally appeared in Country ZEST in Spring 2020 and has been updated for this issue.
Two Brave Men Honored as Civil Rights Stalwarts
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By Emma Boyce
James Smith still recalls the afternoon, nearly sixty years ago, when he walked into Bradfield’s drug store on West Washington Street. He was just a young man then. Inside the store, he moved to find an attendant, stepping briefly on a small, black square painted on the floor. A woman stopped him and pointed to the ground: African-Americans weren’t permitted beyond the square.
“The woman said to me, you have to stand in this black square,” said Smith, now retired and in his 80s. “I told her no, I’m not standing on this square. I’m out of here and I left and I never went back.”
Too many of these shameful stories marked the struggle for equal rights. Like many of his contemporaries, Smith, “Smitty” to friends, knows them all too well.
In 1961, not long after that incident, Lena Washington and William McKinley Jackson, head of the Loudoun chapter of the NAACP, asked Smith and three other young African-Americans, including Roger Dodson, Clarence Grayson, and Smith’s longtime neighbor, Reverend William Swann, to stage a sit-in at the lunch counters of three establishments in Middleburg.
“I knew it was going to be risky because it was scary times back then,” said Smith. “But these things had to happen. Somebody had to do it and we went on and did it.”
Each establishment, including Halle Flournoy’s Middleburg Pharmacy on Madison St., had refused to take their orders. As instructed by Jackson, the group left peacefully. A few weeks later, Jackson contacted the men for a second sit-in.
This building on South Madison Street was once the Middleburg Pharmacy.
Photo by Emma Boyce
James “Smitty” Smith with a copy of the town proclamation from Mayor Bridge Littleton.
Photo by Emma Boyce
President John F. Kennedy, then renting a country house, Glen-Ora, just outside Middleburg, was coming to town. This time, they would stay until they were served or cuffed.
The NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) planned to send busloads of civil rights activists to Middleburg.
According to local historian Eugene Scheel, Father Albert Pereira, the celebrant at the Middleburg Community Center where the Kennedys attended Catholic mass, met with town officials and restaurant owners in hopes of defusing the situation.
The combination of the activists and the embarrassment of a pro-civil rights president coming to a segregated town forced the business owners to rethink their positions. That day in 1961,Smith, Swann, Dodson, and Grayson drank Cokes at the counter of Middleburg Pharmacy for the first time. Other establishments capitulated and Middleburg became desegregated.
Mayor Bridge Littleton with Rev. William Swann in 2020, when Littleton presented Rev. Swann an official town proclamation, recognizing his brave efforts of desegregation.
“I wasn’t nervous, I was glad to do it,” said Rev. Swann, who for the last 37 years has served as pastor of the First Ashville Baptist Church in Marshall. “We realize now how much of an accomplishment it was.”
Afterwards, both Smith and Swann said they could feel a change in atmosphere.
“We’ve come a long ways and we have a long ways to go,” said Smith, who still remembers the dirty looks they received all those years ago. “You never know how it is until you feel it yourself. It hurt deeply.”
In 2020, nearly 60 years later, Middleburg Mayor Bridge Littleton presented Smith and Rev. Swann official town proclamations, recognizing their brave efforts. Littleton said he grew up often visiting Smith’s house as a child, but had no idea both men had been at
“God made us all so that nobody is alike,” said Smith. “Why the hatred against each other? It’s getting better, but we have a littleways to go yet.”
The Sona Bank, now the Primis Bank, next to the Safeway, was once Bradfield’s drug store on West Washington Street.
Photo by Emma Boyce
