Paul Lawrence Dunbar High School
The Economics of the Civil Rights Movement
Important African-American Institutions
Lynchburg Civil Rights Organizations
Lynchburg's Newspapers in the Sixties
Martin Luther King, Jr.: Connections to Lynchburg
Prince Edward County: Connections to Lynchburg
Pupil Placement Board in Lynchburg
This website was created to accompany and to supplement “Til’ Justice Rolls Down: The Civil Rights Movement in Lynchburg, Virginia,” a fascinating television program researched and produced by Gloria Cannady for Virginia’s 13/ABC, and now available as a DVD. This half-hour program, narrated by Dr. Virgil Wood, Lynchburg’s most noted civil rights leader, presents revealing interviews with a number of prominent civil rights activists, news footage and newspaper headlines from the fifties and sixties, and photographs and recordings which tell the city’s unfolding civil rights story.
This site was created for anyone interested in American history, civil rights history, Lynchburg, Virginia history. While not specifically designed as a teaching tool, it is hoped that the students of the Lynchburg City Public Schools who are preparing for the Standards of Learning tests will find this site useful.
Gloria W. Cannady is a native of Lynchburg, Virginia and grew up there during the height of the city’s Civil Rights Movement. In 1964, at the age of eleven, she and her brother, along with a handful of other black students were the first to integrate Perrymont Elementary School. Her older brother was the first black student to attend and graduate from The Hill School, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. The three siblings were inspired and influenced by the work of their dedicated parents, Anne, a schoolteacher and one of the founding organizers of The Lynchburg Voters League, a grass roots voter education/registration drive and Dr. Robert C. Wesley Sr., one of the original members of the city’s Bi-Racial Commission.
After graduation, in 1975, from Virginia Union University in Richmond, Gloria began a twenty-five +years career in communications, first in broadcast television, as a production specialist, commercial and promotions producer, and Community Services Director. It was during her 16-year tenure at WSET-TV, an ABC affiliate in Lynchburg that Til Justice Rolls Down was produced. Since then, she has gained over ten years experience in Marketing and Public Relations. At the Academy of MusicTheatre, she was Director of Marketing & PR, and founding co-coordinator and managing director of Black Theatre Ensemble of Virginia. Currently serving on the Board of BTE, she’s in charge of marketing and PR, and serves as the ensemble’s production co-coordinator. She has also gained experience as a sales representative and marketing consultant for an urban / R&B radio station.
Gloria is the very proud mother of two daughters and the grandmother of two grandsons.
In 1959, the same year Crystabel Harris tried to transfer from Dunbar to E.C. Glass, Patricia Wild’s family moved from upstate New York to Lynchburg. The “tacky Yankee” was a senior at E. C. Glass High School on January 29, 1962, when fourteen-year-old Owen Cardwell and thirteen-year-old Lynda Woodruff crossed the all-White high school’s threshold. Nearly forty years later, Wild began to wonder: Whatever happened to those young and courageous “firsts” who desegregated Glass?
Since posing that question, Reverend Cardwell, Dr. Woodruff, and the website author have subsequently met several times. The former Lynchburg resident has also made six trips to Lynchburg to learn the history lessons she was never taught at segregated Glass. From countless interviews with Lynchburg residents and with the help of the good people at Lynchburg’s Legacy Museum of African American History, the Jones Memorial Library, and several Lynchburg historians, the “tacky Yankee” has compiled the body of information regarding Lynchburg’s civil rights movement which informs this website.
Patricia Wild lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. She is the author of Swimming In It, a novel published by Flower Valley Press in 1998 and Way Opens: A Spiritual Journey, published by Warwick House Publishing. Her short stories and poetry have been published in several New England journals and magazines. She is a columnist for The Somerville Journal.