The changing of the guard Those who fought to end Jim Crow are dying. How will we preserve those memories?
When John Lewis, the long-time representative of Georgia’s 5th Congressional District and an icon of the civil rights movement, announced in December that he was battling Stage 4 pancreatic cancer, journalist Adam Serwer posed something to consider.
“I don’t think we are prepared as a society for what happens to public memory when the generations that lived through Jim Crow leave us,” the Atlantic magazine writer tweeted.
That was made clear for the nation on Monday, as it is every year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, as people, politicians, corporations and brands offer their often incorrect and self-serving spin on the civil rights leader’s legacy.
And it is clear for Hampton Roads today, following news that Louis Linwood Cousins Sr. died Jan. 17 of heart failure in San Antonio at the age of 76.
Cousins’ name may not be immediately familiar to many residents of the region, and surely doesn’t boast the recognition by history of a Lewis or a King. But as one of the “Norfolk 17,” the first group of African American students who integrated the city’s public schools in 1959, his story is one this community must not forget.
Pilot reporter Sara Gregory, writing about Cousins’ death this week, noted that he was one of 151 students who applied to attend white Norfolk public schools four years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.
Virginia lawmakers had shamefully worked to delay and obstruct integration efforts, going so far as to pass a measure to withhold funding and close any school that agreed to accept African American students.
In 1958, as schools in Warren County, Charlottesville and Norfolk moved to comply with court orders to integrate, that law served to shutter the schools, locking 13,000 students — 10,000 children in Norfolk — out of their classrooms.
“We cannot continue this way. The state is bound by every obligation of governmental principle and human dignity and decency, and its own self-interest to find a better policy than the one we live under,” Lenoir Chambers wrote in a Pulitzer Prize winning Virginian-Pilot editorial on Jan. 1, 1959.
That argument of dignity and decency won out but, by then, the 151 brave young people who first applied to attend public schools in Norfolk had winnowed to 17. So it was that on Feb. 2, 1959, that group — the Norfolk 17 — entered school buildings across the city.
Among them was Cousins, the first black student to attend a high school named for Matthew Fontaine Maury, the famous oceanographer and Virginia native who resigned his commission in the U.S. Navy to serve the Confederacy.
There might be no greater sign of history’s forward march than a 15-year-old black teenager attending a school named for a Confederate military leader. And now, some 61 years since that watershed moment, Cousins is gone, his act of courage ascribed to memory.
There will be more moments such as this and, as Serwer worried, soon will come a time that those who lived through Jim Crow — who suffered through integration, who fought for equality under the law and, yes, even those who stood on the wrong side of history — will be gone.
What then? In an era when we no longer agree on facts, when the truth is dismissed as fake, when social media platforms meant to connect us are used as tools of division and when people are content to live in protective bubbles, what then?
Will future generations even believe what Virginia once did to people — to children — based solely on the color of their skin? Will they comprehend the power of the state once barred the doors of the public schools and made brave young people put themselves at risk to force them open?
That question is now before us, both as a commonwealth and as a nation, and it deserves serious, solemn reflection. No more so than now as we bid farewell, and offer our gratitude, to another member of the Norfolk 17.