Word: virginia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Virginia has always been in the forefront of racial change. It was at Jamestown in 1619 that the first shipload of captive Africans later destined for slavery disembarked. It was at Appomattox in 1865 that the Confederacy surrendered. It was in Virginia in the 1950s that men who fancied themselves learned penned some of the last erudite-sounding but morally bankrupt justifications for segregation. And it will be in Richmond on Jan. 13 that there will be a black hand on the Bible when Lawrence Douglas Wilder is sworn in as Virginia's 73rd Governor. It is not only...
CAPTION: What mattered in Virginia...
Tuesday's elections gave us America's first elected black Governor, Doug Wilder of Virginia. That event, along with an analysis of the progress blacks have made in other contests, and Lance Morrow's account of his return to the grass roots of Prince Edward County, was our cover story until Thursday afternoon. But then came the stunning announcement that East Germans be allowed to travel through the Berlin Wall and would be granted freer elections as well. Bonn bureau chief Jim Jackson called me to urge that we change the cover, but my fellow editors and I hardly needed...
...order of things, the feudal inevitabilities, can be changed, with endurance. The Old South was always saying No! in thunder, and Virginia had a gift of eloquent defiance. In 1959, rather than submit to federal court orders to merge their two public school systems (black and white), the supervisors of Prince Edward County closed them down, and then kept them closed for five years. It was an extension of "massive resistance," the last stand of states' rights. The position was argued in high legalisms. But in deeper truth, Senator Harry F. Byrd Sr. and other leaders of white Virginia were...
...Prince Edward County's public schools had the lowest test scores in Virginia. But in the years since then, the public schools have made a gradual and remarkable recovery. Now Prince Edward County High School's student body is 62% black, 38% white. The tuition to attend the white private school (some 630 white students and six black) is now $2,495, and many white families have decided they can find a superior education (free) at the public schools. Even white families from surrounding counties are applying. Test scores for students in the public schools now approach the national average...