Bucket Carriers

“A lot of people carried the water bucket.” (Virgil Wood)

Rebecca Owen

Father John Teeter

Mr. and Mrs. Olivet C. Thaxton

Other Notable Bucket Carriers

Pre-Civil Rights Movement Activists

 

 

A. Rebecca Owen
Rebecca Owen grew up in Saluda, VA, and was an active member of the Methodist Church. A scholarship student at Methodist-affiliated Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, in the summer of 1960 Rebecca was a delegate to the National Student Christian Federation’s General Assembly in Denver. At the General Assembly, Rebecca met the Greensboro, NC, sit-inners. Back at R-MWC that fall, Rebecca began to organize interracial student discussion groups which met at Lynchburg’s Unitarian-Universalist Church and at Reverend Virgil Wood’s Diamond Hill Baptist Church. Along with Barbara Thomas and Kenneth Greene (Virginia Seminary), Terrill Brumback and James Hunter (Lynchburg College), and Mary Edith Bentley (R-MWC), Rebecca Owen was arrested at Patterson’s Drug Store, December 14, 1960.

 

B. Father John Teeter:
Father John Teeter arrived in Lynchburg in 1959. The White pastor of a predominantly African-American Episcopal congregation, The Church of the Good Shepherd, Father Teeter refused to participate in any segregated activities in his new city. At the Patterson Drug Store sit-inners’ appeal hearing, Judge S. Duval Martin declared that seating in the courtroom would be segregated. When Reverend Teeter attempted to sit in the African-American section, police officers dragged him from the courthouse. A photograph of this incident soon appeared in newspapers all over the country.

 

C. Mr. and Mrs. Olivet C. Thaxton

My wife was one of the few people who worked behind the scenes in the civil rights movement. I can’t begin to tell you how many people we would feed. She would prepare all the meals for these people every weekend for a year or two; we just had people in here just about four or five people at a time. 1

Owner of a Lynchburg hauling business and a charter member of the Lynchburg Improvement Association (LIA), Olivet Thaxton lost his contract with Patterson Drug Store after the downtown drug store sit-in.

 

[Mr. Patterson] told me why he’d fired me. As you know, I had a contract to do hauling for him and several of his stores once a week and these sit-inners sat in his Drug Store. They locked them up and so they had a mass meeting to raise money. Someone called me up and asked me to assist in lifting the offering at Court Street Baptist Church. I went up to assist in lifting the offering. The next day, Mr. Patterson called me and wanted me to see him. He wanted to talk to me and I went down to his place of business and he told me that someone told him that I was working harder against him than for him. He fired me right there on the spot, right then. 2
 

D. Other Notable Bucket Carriers:

 

Edward and Georgia Barksdale

You all didn’t do anything without your parents being there. We were there! [Georgia Barksdale] 1

Dunbar had forty-two subjects. E.C. Glass had one-hundred and twenty-one. 'Separate but equal'? My math must be off. . . People basically know that everybody wants the best for their children. And that's all we were asking for. [Edward Barksdale] 2

Noted civil rights activists, parents of Lynda Woodruff, who, at age 13, entered the all-White E.C. Glass High School, January 29, 1962. For many years, Edward Barksdale was a Lynchburg city councilor.

 

Theodore Burton
Active member of the Lynchburg Improvement Association; his barber shop was on 12th Street

 

Dr. Leslie Camm

"When Brown vs. the Board of Education went in, I thought integration was going to take place tomorrow. As it turned out, it was a long, long wait.1"

Noted Lynchburg educator and historian, author of “Blacks in Lynchburg, Virginia, 1933 – 1945”

 

 

O.C. Cardwell

As small as it might have been, we paid our fair share of taxes and we felt that the tax dollars were spent to educate White children and prepare them for the future better than it did Black children. 1

Charter member of the Lynchburg Improvement Association (LIA), president of the Lynchburg chapter of the NAACP, 1972 –1976, Owen Cardwell’s father, author of “No Matter How Long,” an unpublished manuscript about Lynchburg’s civil rights movement.

 

Owen Cardwell, Brenda Hughes, Cecilia Jackson, Lynda Woodruff

[Being four African-American students in a school with over 2,500 White students] was a daily assault. 1

The first African-American students to enter E.C. Glass High School, 1962.

        

William Gordon
Appointed to the Bi-Racial Commission, early member of the Lynchburg Improvement Association, the owner of Community Cleaners.

 

Crystabel Harris

The first Dunbar High School student to request a transfer to E.C. Glass,1959
        
Fred Harris
Crystabel Harris’s father, a Lynchburg insurance salesman, and bail bondsman for Lynchburg civil rights activists.

 

Junius Haskins, Jr.
Dunbar High graduate; Youth Director for the Lynchburg Community Action Group. In 1969, with Reverend Haywood Robinson, Jr., organized the Monument Terrace protest.

 

Mrs. Virginia (Woodward) Hughes
The first African-American to serve on the Lynchburg police payroll—as a crossing guard. Her husband, John Hughes, was also a well-respected civil rights activist.

 

Carl Hutcherson
First African-American appointed to the Lynchburg Board of Education, 1953. Key
architect, with Richard Gifford, of Lynchburg’s school desegregation process

 

Dr. G.F. Jackson
Noted African-American dentist, member of the Bi-Racial Commission, father of Cecelia Jackson

 

Charles  M.L. Mangum

They always told me not to come to Lynchburg [in 1966], that I couldn’t make a living because the town was too divided. They told me that there were three or four particular factions here and that each faction would turn against me if I were identified with one particular faction. But being young and headstrong, I decided no one could tell me where I could make a living; I decided to come here. 1

Noted African-American lawyer. Attorney Mangum, publisher of The Piedmont Journal, still lives in Lynchburg.


        
Mary Payne

The night that Dr. King spoke, the committee that brought him here was asking people to sign up to participate in different kinds of work. I signed up immediately that night and beginning that very next day, I began taking action to help bring about a change. . . I was involved with a union situation at Craddock-Terry [a Lynchburg shoe manufacturer and major employer] which caused me to lose my job. I left there and worked as a voter registrant for the Lynchburg Voters League for a while. I decided that I needed to get something to do that would give me some kind of protection as far as holding a job. After completing the licensed practical nurse course, I was hired at Lynchburg General Hospital as a practical nurse. 1

 

Reverend Haywood Robinson, Jr.

A School Board reporter [asked]: ‘How do you feel being the first Black Chairman of the Lynchburg School Board?’ I remember saying, ‘The first thing I feel is a deep longing for the day when no Black person will ever have to answer that question again.’ 1

Born in Lynchburg, returned to Lynchburg in 1964 to serve as pastor at Diamond Hill Baptist Church. In 1968, with Junius Haskins, Jr., led a demonstration at the foot of Monument Terrace. The first African-American chairman of the School Board.

 

L. Garnell Stamps
Vice-chairman of BLAC and a public school teacher

 

M.W. Thornhill, Jr.

My first interest in political life in Lynchburg took place when I graduated from Dunbar High School at our Baccalaureate Service. The late Dr. Frank P. Lewis delivered a stirring message and he motivated many of us to leave there that day and try to do something to make our City, State, and Country a better place for Black people to live.1

President of the Lynchburg Voters’ League, a member of the Bi-Racial Commission, and Lynchburg’s first African-American mayor.

 

Laura Irvine Williams
First African-American hired as cashier at A&P Supermarket

 

E. Pre-civil rights movement activists

 

1. Mary Rice Hayes Allen
One of the founders of the Lynchburg chapter of the NAACP. In 1906, she served as president of Virginia Seminary for two years.

 

2. H.A.M. Johns

“[Johns’s] favorite quotation was from a prayer which states: ‘Do not pray for easy lives but pray to be strong men, and do not pray for a task equal to your power but for power equal to your tasks.’ I think this is what he lived by. 1”

3. Vernon Johns (1892-1965)

4. Dr. Frank P. Lewis
Revered professor, Virginia Seminary, noted historian

 

5. Permilia “Amelia” Elizabeth Perry Pride (1857-1932)

 

Notes, Links

 

Rebecca Owen: Notes, Links

Much of the information about Rebecca Owen is culled from Carolyn Wilkerson Bell’s book-in-progress about the history of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College.

Recommended Books:

Journeys that Opened up the World: Women Student Christian Movements and Social Justice, 1955 – 1975 edited by Sara M. Evans, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 2003
Link : www.gfsnet.org/msweb/sixties/lunchcounterarmfeb1960.htm

Father John Teeter Notes

1. A City Unto Itself: Virginia in the 20th Century by Darrell Laurant, The News and Advance, 1997, p. 118

Mr. and Mrs. Olivet C. Thaxton Notes

1. From “No Matter How Long,” an unpublished manuscript by O.C. Cardwell, p. 54
2. Ibid, p. 51

Edward and Georgia Barksdale Notes

1. Interview, January 15, 2002
2. Interview, September 27, 2004

Dr. Leslie Camm Notes

1. A City Unto Itself: Virginia in the 20th Century by Darrell Laurant, The News and Advance, 1997, p. 115

O.C. Cardwell Notes

1. “No Matter How Long,” p. 8

Owen Cardwell, Brenda Hughes, Cecilia Jackson, Lynda Woodruff Notes

1. Brenda Hughes Andrews, quoted on the Til’ Justice Rolls Down: The Civil Rights Movement in Lynchburg, Virginia, DVD

Charles  M.L. Mangum Notes

1. “No Matter How Long,” an unpublished manuscript by O.C. Cardwell, p. 72

Mary Payne Notes

1. “No Matter How Long,” an unpublished manuscript by O.C. Cardwell, pp. 60, 61

Reverend Haywood Robinson, Jr. Notes

1. “No Matter How Long,” an unpublished manuscript by O.C. Cardwell,p. 87

M.W. Thornhill, Jr. Notes

1. “No Matter How Long,” an unpublished manuscript by O.C. Cardwell, p. 37

Mary Rice Hayes Allen Notes

Recommended book: Freedom’s Child: The Story of My Mother, A Confederate General’s Black Daughter by Carrie Allen McCray, Algonquin Books, Chapel Hill, 1998

H.A.M. Johns Notes

1. “No Matter How Long,” an unpublished manuscript by O.C. Cardwell, p. 2

Vernon Johns Link: www.vernonjohns.org
Permilia “Amelia” Elizabeth Perry Pride Link: www.gravegarden.org