January 29, 1962

“School integration came quietly to snow-crusted Lynchburg today,” declared The Daily Advance on January 29, 1962. Accompanying the afternoon newspaper’s account of Lynda and Owen’s first day at E.C. Glass is a photograph of thirteen-year-old Lynda Woodruff and fourteen-year-old Owen C. Cardwell, Jr. Lynda, wearing “a red carcoat,” emerges from her mother and stepfather’s “small blue sedan.” “The Woodruff girl” stands beside the opened back-seat door; rather than face the newspaper’s cameraman, she looks down at the pile of notebooks she carries. Owen, “a tall, slender youth,” also holding a notebook or two, stands beside the “neat, dark-eyed girl.” His hair cut very short and wearing a dark jacket and neatly pressed slacks, the young Owen stares off into the distance, an apprehensive look on his face. The Daily Advance’s photograph of that historic event reveals the two neatly dressed “Negro teenagers” against the stark and unexpected background of snowbanks, whitened trees, snow-covered ground and school steps. In the early hours of Sunday, January 28, 1962, a freakish snow storm dumped almost a foot of snow on Lynchburg.


At lunch their first day, Owen Cardwell and Lynda Woodruff went to two different cafeterias. (Dunbar High School had not had a cafeteria for many years; imagine the pair’s surprise to discover that their new school had two!)


Nearly forty years later, Dr. Lynda Woodruff and Reverend Owen Cardwell recalled what happened next:


“The thing that was just so remarkable was the stuff we didn’t know,” Dr. Woodruff began. “Now, remember, coming from Dunbar, very organized, very small, everybody in that school knew each other both in school and in the community. We get dropped into an ocean of twenty-six hundred students, a hundred-some faculty, maybe? I don’t know.”

“Actually, there were thirty-two hundred kids,” Reverend Cardwell corrected her.


“Thirty-two hundred kids, right,” she agreed. “Anyhow, that first day, did we know there were two cafeterias? No! . . . I was in the other cafeteria, terrified, because I couldn’t find him: ‘My God, did he turn White between first period and fourth period?’ ”

“I crossed over!” her co-desegregator joked.


“ ‘Did he leave me, here? Has he gone home? Did somebody hurt him?’ I panicked when I couldn’t find Owen. And, of course, the newspaper says, ‘Everything went just perfectly fine.’ Well, that was the biggest lie!

“I was in the very back of the line in Cafeteria Two; he was over there in Cafeteria One. When that line got closer to the door to go in,” Dr. Woodruff continued, “I looked in there, and for the first time in my E. C. Glass career, I found my survival rope. Her name was Thelma Campbell.”

“Right,” Reverend Cardwell added.

“And she looked at me, and I guess I had to have been crying at the time. Tears, but silently suffering. When I got into the line, she had—I remember it clearly: White lady, nice, little lady with this handkerchief and her nametag on it. Said ‘Supervisor’ on it—so Thelma’s supervisor was standing on her left arm and the dietetics director was standing on her right arm [inside the kitchen where food was served]. Well, everybody was where they could see the two Negroes! [Thelma] was trying to communicate to me that Owen was safe and in the next cafeteria. Except I didn’t know what she was saying! She kept doing the head thing [gesturing with her head towards the other cafeteria]. Because I didn’t know there were two cafeterias. So I thought Thelma had a tic. Some sort of neurological disorder or something! But she finally got an excuse to come out [from the kitchen area to the area with tables and chairs] under the pretense of picking up ketchup bottles or whatever, and she says, ‘Hi, child, you okay?’

“I said, ‘Fine.’

“She says, ‘Owen’s over in the other cafeteria. He’s okay.’ And that’s when I realized there were two cafeterias and that’s where Owen was. So that calmed me down.” 1


Notes:

1. Interview, January 15, 2002