The Civil Rights Movement in Lynchburg, Virginia

Introduction

Let justice roll on like a river and righteousness like an everflowing stream. (Amos 5: 24)

“The wind of change is blowing all over the world today. It is sweeping away an old order and bringing into being a new order,” declared Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1963. That fierce wind of change blew through Lynchburg, Virginia during the civil rights era. In 1955, the same year Virginia’s “massive resistance” began, a young, energetic preacher, Reverend Virgil Wood, arrived in poet Anne Spencer’s hometown.


Quickly dubbed “local Negro agitator” by Lynchburg’s newspapers, Reverend Wood, an associate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., challenged Lynchburg’s “separate but equal” status quo. Dr. Wood was not alone, however: “A lot of people carried the water bucket,” Dr. Wood noted. Whether quietly supporting the 1961 Freedom Riders or staging a dramatic sit-in at a Whites Only drug store counter or, with help from the NAACP, confronting Lynchburg’s segregated public schools, Lynchburg’s many “bucket carriers” brought about a new order.

 

About Photographs (Left to Right)

1.The “Patterson Six,” arrested for a sit-in at Patterson Drugstore, December, 1960, pray in front of Corporation Courthouse (February 6, 1961). Left to right: Barbara Thomas, Rebecca Owen, Mary Edith Bentley, Terrill Brumback, James Hunter, and Kenneth Greene (in background.)

 

2. Reverend John Teeter being ejected from Lynchburg’s Corporation Court because he refused to sit in a segregated courtroom (February 6, 1961).

 

3. The NAACP pickets the F.W. Woolworth’s Five and Ten on Main Street (November, 1960).

 

4. Rebecca Owen, Kenneth Greene (wearing hat), Mary Edith Bentley, and James Hunter sitting at the Patterson Drugstore lunch counter. (December 14, 1960.)

 

5. “Krushchev can eat here but we can’t.” Sign held by NAACP member in front of Woolworth’s. (Nikita Khrushchev was prime minister of the Soviet Union.)

 

6. Crowd leaving courthouse during Patterson Six trial. (February, 1961)

 

7. Left to right: Civil rights leaders M. W. Thornhill, Jr., W. H. Reynolds, Junius Haskins, Jr., O. C. Cardwell, Mary Payne, and Carl B. Hutcherson, Jr. plan the State Convention of Virginia’s NAACP branches, held in Lynchburg in 1972. In background: Court Street Baptist Church.