The Norfolk Seventeen: Massive Resistance Meets Its Limit

In September of nineteen fifty-eight, Governor J. Lindsay Almond of Virginia ordered six Norfolk schools closed rather than comply with federal court orders to integrate them. Roughly ten thousand students found themselves without a school. Nearly a third of them spent the entire fall semester without formal education of any kind.

The closure was the largest single act of school defiance in the Massive Resistance campaign that Senator Harry Byrd had championed across Virginia since the Supreme Court's nineteen fifty-four Brown v. Board of Education decision. Virginia would close schools, the thinking went, before it would integrate them.

The federal courts had other ideas. Judge Walter E. Hoffman looked closely at the entrance examinations the Norfolk school board had required of Black applicants and found that the tests covered material one to three grade levels above what the students were currently studying. He ordered the board to admit seventeen students. On February second, nineteen fifty-nine, those seventeen Black children walked into six previously all-white Norfolk schools.

They faced a crowd. One account described projectiles being thrown. Several students were spit upon, shoved down stairs, and had their belongings destroyed. They maintained perfect attendance.

Lenoir Chambers, the editor of the Virginian-Pilot, had spent five years writing editorials arguing that Virginia should comply with the law. In nineteen sixty, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing, his citation acknowledging The Year Virginia Closed the Schools and The Year Virginia Opened the Schools, published exactly one year apart. The schools stayed open. The Norfolk Seventeen stayed, and finished.