Notable Civil Rights Events

Patterson Drug Store Sit-In

Freedom Riders in Lynchburg (1961)

A & P Supermarket Picket: May, 1961: A protest Against the Store’s Hiring Practice

Miller Pool: July 4, 1961

The Desegregation of E.C. Glass

Monument Terrace Demonstration: July, 1969

The Motorcade

 

Patterson Drug Store Sit-In

On December 14, 1960, Rebecca Owen and Mary Edith Bentley (Randolph-Macon Women's College), Terrill Brumback and James Hunter (Lynchburg College), and Barbara Thomas and Kenneth Greene (Virginia Seminary), a bi-racial group, sat down together at the counter of Patterson’s Drug Store. They were arrested for trespassing, tried, and sentenced to thirty days in jail. The “Patterson Six” appealed.

 

Freedom Riders in Lynchburg (1961)

 

Lynchburg's bus staton in 1961, now a restaurant

"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. . . We entertained the Freedom Riders. They came through on their bus tour. We fed them at one of the local churches, Eighth Street that night. . . [The Freedom Riders] tried to get a shoe shine in Rocky Hill, South Carolina and they were beaten and had all these stitches on their head and face." 1

 

 

A & P Supermarket Picket: May, 1961: A protest Against the Store’s Hiring Practice

"It just so happened that my sister got involved in the [civil rights] movement…She was picketing on 12th Street in front of the A& P Store. I just decided that I was going to go into the A & P and ask for a job, because they did not have Black checkers at the time. . . I was hired on the spot. It seemed to me that [the manager] was relieved that a Black had come to apply for a job because I think the pickets were hurting the business." 1

 

 

Miller Pool: July 4, 1961

 

"I went down to the pool to get in the [Whites only] pool and I asked admission to the pool, but the lady never looked at me and these six kids I had with me. Then I insisted that I was not going to ask her again to let me get in the pool and she was looking over my head all the time.

Then someone behind me said, ‘Mr Thaxton, didn’t Reverend Wood tell you that if you tried to get in this pool that they would close the pool?’I told him it was hot out there and we wanted to go swimming like other folks that were swimming.

He said, ‘Okay, if you insist.’

He blew a whistle and made everybody get out of the pool and then they said they said they were going over and close Dearington pool. They had a pool out in Dearington exclusively for Colored people." 1

Lynchburg’s public swimming pools remained closed for nearly five years. During that time, because they couldn’t swim in a public pool on a hot summer day, four African-American boys swam in the James River and were drowned. 2

 

The Desegregation of E.C. Glass

 

“They published our IQs, test scores, report card grades, everything in The Lynchburg News,” Lynda Woodruff stated. “We were originally turned down because ‘we weren’t smart enough’. . . And Virgil Wood took them to task and said, ‘How could you have criteria and academic standards for a public school?’ So then they had to back off the IQ rejection. . .”

“Understand the ramifications of that,” Owen Cardwell noted sorrowfully. “We had to be so much better than our White counterparts.” 1

In June of 1961, the parents of Owen Cardwell, Brenda Hughes, Cecilia Jackson, and Lynda Woodruff submitted transfer requests to the Lynchburg School Board on behalf of their children. In July of 1961, the City of Lynchburg sent the four "Negro children" transfer applications to the Pupil Placement Board in Richmond. Not surprisingly, the PPB rejected the applications. With the aid of their NAACP lawyers, however, the four students and their parents appealed this decision.


A hearing was held in Roanoke in August 1961. Again, Virginia's Pupil Placement Board denied the four requests. Reuben Lawson and James M. Nabrit III, lawyers for the NAACP Legal Fund, appealed the Pupil Placement Board's decision at the U.S. District Court of Western Virginia. Judge Thomas Michie presided.


Michie, a former mayor of Charlottesville, ruled that the PPB had discriminated against Lynda Woodruff and Owen Cardwell. Fourteen-year-old Owen and thirteen-year-old Lynda began classes at E.C. Glass on January 29, 1962. As the result of a subsequent court case, Brenda Hughes and Cecelia Jackson began classes at Glass in the fall of 1962.

 

Monument Terrace Demonstration: July, 1969

 

In the summer of 1969, there were limited recreational programs for African-American youth. Junius Haskins, Jr., Youth Director for the Lynchburg Community Action Group, and other activists, found an abandoned school building, obtained permission from city officials to create a recreation center for African-American youths, and Haskins and a group of teenagers began painting.


A few days after work had begun, the  youth workers discovered their building  closed. When the City Manager explained that the intended recreation center had been closed because of sanitary conditions, the youth workers cleaned it up. The school building was then vandalized and The News and The Daily Advance implied that the youth workers, themselves, had trashed the space.

 

"In a meeting at Court Street Baptist Church in the basement, we organized an official protest demonstration. The first demonstration took place downtown at Monument Terrace. All the kids were involved – other youth that were concerned and committed to the program – they joined in. Adults joined in – Black and White – because it was a terrible injustice that had been done.

. . . I got some wrist sweatbands – which looked like shackles – and got some lightweight chain and lined up about twenty to twenty-five kids and chained them together. . . We sang “We Shall Overcome,” “Ain’t No Turning Us Around,” and all the civil rights and spiritual freedom songs. We literally stopped traffic at the intersection of Ninth and Church because this was not supposed to happen in Lynchburg. But folk began to realize that this was just the beginning of a change in the City of Lynchburg." 1

The Motorcade

The motorcade was a show of force, the fact that we were organized, we meant business, and we’re going to let you see us in full strength. 1

 

The Monument Terrace demonstration led to another notable demonstration: Forty to forty-five cars, driven by African-Americans, formed a motorcade. This motorcade slowly drove through White residential areas.

 

Notes, Links


Freedom Riders Notes:

1. From “No Matter How Long,” an unpublished manuscript by O. C. Cardwell, p. 54, 55.

 


Recommended Reading:Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement by John Lewis [one of the Freedom Riders], Harcourt, Brace, 1998, pp. 128 - 172

 


Link:Freedom Ride: link1

 

 

A&P Picket Notes:

1. Laura Irvine Williams, interview in “No Matter How Long,” an unpublished manuscript by O.C. Cardwell, pp. 61, 62.

 

Miller Pool Notes:

1. Olivet Thaxton, in “No Matter How Long,” an unpublished manuscript by O.C. Cardwell, p. 51
2. “Til’ Justice Rolls Down: The Civil Rights Movement in Lynchburg, Virginia” DVD


Desegregation of E.C. Glass Notes:

1.  Interview, January 15, 2002

 

Monument Terrace Notes

 1. Junius Haskins, Jr., in “No Matter How Long,” an unpublished manuscript by O.C. Cardwell, p. 45

 

The Motorcade Notes

1. Junius Haskins, Jr., in “No Matter How Long,” an unpublished manuscript by O.C. Cardwell, p. 45