Lloyd Snook

GEORGE GILLIAM: [00:00:00] Good.  Today we are interviewing Lloyd Snook at his residence in Charlottesville.  Present is George Gilliam, me, Phyllis Leffler, Lorenzo Dickerson, our cinematographer, and Lloyd Snook.  Lloyd, what’s your date of birth? 

LLOYD SNOOK: [00:00:21] April 11, 1953. 

(phone beeps)

GG: [00:00:28] Let me get rid of that. 

LS: [00:00:39] Just one more extraneous noise.  

GG: [00:00:46] Just shut it off.  That’s -- could you, just for background purposes, [00:01:00] walk us through your schools, giving us the years that you attended those schools? 

LS: [00:01:06] Well, from the very beginning, there’d be Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School in Cranford, New Jersey.  That would be roughly 1958 to 1961.  1961, we moved down to Charlottesville, and I started Venable Elementary School for fourth grade, attended there through seventh grade.  So that would put me through the end, I guess, June of 1965.  In 1965, then, I started at Walker.  That was the first year of Walker, at a time when Walker went to the old Jefferson school in the morning, and Buford went in the afternoon, because they hadn’t finished Walker      and Buford at that point.  As I recall, there was a plumber’s strike, as a result of which they couldn’t get toilet [00:02:00] facilities to put into the buildings.  Anyways, so I was there in eighth grade.  Then ninth grade was the end of first true class at Walker Junior High, as it was then.  That would have been ’66 to ’67.  And then in September of ’67 began at Lane High School and graduated from there in June of 1970.  Then off to Stanford for four years.  Spent a couple of years working in the Bay Area, then went to Michigan Law School and graduated in 1979, then came back to God’s country.  

GG: [00:02:42] Did you ever attend the basement schools? 

LS: [00:02:47] No.  

GG: [00:02:48] So you were not affected by the closing of the schools --

LS: [00:02:51] No. 

GG: [00:02:52] At any stage? 

LS: [00:02:54] No. 

GG: [00:02:56] At any of those levels, all the way up through [00:03:00] graduation, were you ever an athlete? 

LS: [00:03:04] No.  I was in the class, or in the group of basketball players who was good enough to make a shot but not good enough to get a shot.  

GG: [00:03:18] Well put, well put.  I guess we’ll see about that tonight, with the Duke game.  Were you friends with athletes along the way? 

LS: [00:03:32] Yeah, a lot of them.  In fact, I’ll say my first friend in Charlottesville was Kent Merritt, because when we both went to our fourth-grade class together, we were the only two new kids in the class.  I was, of course, new having just moved there.  Kent was, I guess, new cause of just having come from another school.  So we didn’t know anybody else, so we got to know each other pretty well. 

GG: [00:03:58] Were you a fan? 

LS: [00:04:00] Very much, very much.  Went to all the football games, most of the basketball games. 

PHYLLIS LEFFLER: [00:04:12] Were those games high school games? 

LS: [00:04:15] High school, yeah, high school.  And in college, I would go to all the football games, too.  And in law school, I went to all the football games I could.  

GG: [00:04:23] So from your high school days, who do you stay in touch with?  Who are the folks that you were good friends with that you now -- 

LS: [00:04:32] Probably the one that I stay in most constant contact with, most frequent contact, Mike Skinner was and his wife, Kathy Harris, were both classmates.  Mike is a forester down in the Blacksburg area.  Kathy just retired from teaching in the English department down there.  Among football-player types, I stay in contact with Kent.  Not [00:05:00] regularly, but frequently.  Robert King, Thomas Wells.  I see Franklin Wells around town from time to time.  They’re a bunch of the other football-player folks that I was never really terribly close to, but would remain at least friendly.  Franklin Wells, I think, played on a, probably the world’s worst recreational basketball team that I was on.  To show you how bad it was, I was the leading scorer.  We had football players who were there more for the fun than for the basketball.  So anyway. 

GG: [00:05:49] So wh     at was your parents’ attitudes about race relations generally, and desegregation specifically? 

LS: [00:05:58] Well, they [00:06:00] were, of course having come from the North, they were not inculcated in the ways of the South.  And they were very liberal by standards of the day.  Give you an example, Eugene Williams constantly reminds me that my parents were the first white people to invite him and Lorraine into our homes for a social occasion.  They were frequently involved in things with Henry Mitchell in particular.  My mother was the person at Saint Paul’s Memorial Church who was working most closely with the folks at Trinity to develop the Trinity daycare program, which began in like ’65, ’66.  When Camp Faith got started up in 1967, my mother was the president of the board.  My father, though a [00:07:00] devoted golfer, quit Farmington when Farmington refused to integrate, a decision that they had in about 1965 or so.  And so the Snook family, along with a bunch of other university people, and the Mitchells and Coach Jones and Cal Cage and a bunch of other Black leaders, educators in particular, all moved out to Keswick together.  So a lot of history of both of my parents being really involved in those kinds of things.  That’s one of the reasons why their names are on the Drewary Brown Bridge as bridge builders. 

GG: [00:07:42] I remember them very well.  And they were real leaders and workers.  And you could always rely on them.  Good, very good people.  Did you --

PL: [00:07:53] Can I interrupt?  Can you tell us what Camp Faith was? 

LS: [00:07:56] Yeah.  Camp Faith was a poverty-area day camp that was [00:08:00] started, grew out of the Trinity Project.  And it was really a project of folks at Saint Paul’s, at Wesley Methodist Church, Westminster Presbyterian Church, University Baptist, Trinity Church.  It was a church-based group that was specifically intended to bring city and county, Black and white kids together.  It was on a property out in Earlysville that was owned, at the time, by Jim Murray.  And had a lake, or really a glorified pond, where we could teach swimming.  So it was a day camp facility for kids that, it lasted about 10 years. 

GG: [00:08:57] My wife was an early summer, [00:09:00] some sort of --

LS: [00:09:03] Counselor. 

GG: [00:09:04] Counselor of some sort. 

LS: [00:09:05] Right.  And it was something that folks like Paige [Gilliam] and our family and our contemporaries did for summer activities in the teenage years.  We were counselors and helpers in various ways. 

GG: [00:09:23] Did you attend Saint Paul’s Church regularly? 

LS: [00:09:27] Yes.  My parents were always, it was always one or the other among the vestry.  I sang in the junior choir.  My sister sang in the junior choir, yeah. 

GG: [00:09:41] So you all were fully involved in the work of that church. 

LS: [00:09:46] Right.  And in fact, the year, my senior year in high school, as we were being very conscious of such things, we had a young people’s or a youth group service.  And I got to [00:10:00] deliver the sermon.  

GG: [00:10:03] Why am I not surprised?  So who were your best friends and closest associates in student matters, particularly the last three years of your high-school experience? 

LS: [00:10:20] I was in an odd situation because I had a lot of, well, I’ll say casual friends who were among the much more socially active people.  But I was kind of a nerdy, wall-flowery kind of guy.  And I didn’t, my first date wasn’t until my senior year in high school.  I just didn’t do a lot of social stuff.  But best friends back then, I’m not even sure who I would count.  I wasn’t much for just hanging out with people.  I was active [00:11:00] through Boy Scouts.  I had a bunch of friends through Boy Scouts.  I had a bunch of friends through the drama department, players club, things like that. 

GG: [00:11:10] You were a student leader, so who were the people that you would turn to, with more or less regularity, to help you reach out to students? 

LS: [00:11:21] Well, just to use race and integration kinds of things as an example, Scheryl Williams was a very good friend, Eugene Williams’ and Lorraine Williams’ daughter.  In fact, there was one time, I can’t remember now.  I think it was her junior year, so it would have been the spring of 1969, where we had a program of electing a student city council.  And our five candidates included me and [00:12:00] Scheryl Williams.  And I wound up being the mayor, and Scheryl wound up being the vice-mayor.  But Scheryl was a good friend.  We had, in the white community in that same group, Jed Orkin, who had been the student body president the year before.  He was the student body president our junior year.  He was a good friend in that respect.  Lots of friends that I had through Boy Scouts and things like that, and other groups that I was meeting people through.  Laurie Gleason, for example, Charlie and Betz Gleason’s daughter, was a friend.  

GG: [00:12:39] So what about the organized activities that you were involved in? 

LS: [00:12:46] Well, let’s see.  Player’s club.  I was just looking back through my yearbook last night and trying to recall some of these things.  I was involved last year, my [00:13:00] senior year, with the production of the student newspaper, Lanetimes.  We had organized the Student Human Relations Council.  That was, again, drawing on the same folks, Jed and Nina Hamilton and Scheryl Williams and Larry Fortune. 

GG: [00:13:22] On the newspaper, we’ve looked at a lot of issues of the Lanetimes and noticed that very few of the articles have an attribution of who the reporter was or who the columnist was.  What was behind that? 

LS: [00:13:43] I don’t really know.  I wound up on the Lane Times staff because they happened to meet a period when I had an opening.  And I didn’t have anything else to do.  And so I talked to folks, [00:14:00] said what I really want to do is I want to write a column.  And so I was not a reporter.  But I was a columnist.  And I got to write on pretty much anything I wanted to write on.  It was really just by accident that I happened into that.  I have no idea why it is that they would not have made attributions on stories that were covered by reporters. 

GG: [00:14:25] So it was not an effort to protect them from --

LS: [00:14:28] Not that I was ever aware of, no. 

GG: [00:14:32] Talk about the Honor Committee. 

LS: [00:14:35] Well, the National Honor Society, it was not an honor committee like at UVA, for example.  And frankly, it was one of those things where, okay, it was an honor.  Now what?  In some schools, the Honor Society would go out and do various charitable endeavors.  At Lane, at least at that time, not particularly. 

PL: [00:14:58] Can you talk a little more about the Student Human [00:15:00] Relations Committee?  We’ve read quite a bit about that.  I think sometimes, it was called the Bi-Racial Committee in reports.  I’m assuming it was the same.  Why did that form?  

LS: [00:15:16] So in spring of 1968, that being the first year that Lane had been really fully integrated -- Burley had closed down -- and suddenly, a couple hundred, 300 or so Black students arrived.  And there was not a significant change in the faculty.  So a lot of the faculty, they were having to deal with, they were pretty old-line, white faculty members who didn’t really cotton too much to the idea of Black kids coming to the same classes.  So there were a lot of tensions right away.  We had a principal who had very little interest in reaching out and [00:16:00] seeing that the tensions got eased.  And so by, I guess probably May, I’m thinking April or May of 1968, there was a walk-out.  And basically, most of, virtually all of the Black students and some white students walked out in the middle of the school day, and walked down to Henry Mitchell’s church at the corner of what was then the corner of Tenth and Grady [Trinity Episcopal Church].  And Henry proceeded to talk them down from some of the anger that they were expressing, and then tried to turn that into a productive sense of engagement.  And that led ultimately to the formation of what I’ve called the Student Human Relations Committee.  It may have been called by some the Bi-Racial Committee or something, because it clearly was.  But at least what I had in mind, and what my parents had in mind when we were talking about it, was modeling it after [00:17:00] the human relations committees that we -- that was sort of an accepted name for this kind of endeavor.  And that committee began meeting in the fall of ’68, my junior year.  And we ultimately, by November, I think it was the first or second week in November, we had what we called Unity Weekend.  And it involved a number of activities that took place at Saint Paul’s, because it was one place that we knew we could get.  And it was of some size.  And we had activities in the church and around the church, including a dance that was probably the first time anybody had, serious numbers of Blacks and white students had been at the same dance, dancing together.  And just little things like that that seemed to [00:18:00] begin to make a difference.  We did, I remember one thing that we did was put out a glossary of, here are terms that folks, you just don’t use.  Here’s, don’t refer to somebody over the age of 12 as boy.  Just things like that that nowadays, we’ve sort of all intuited.  We’ve grown up with them.  But in 1968, that was news.  

PL: [00:18:31] I’m sure, yeah.  And if I could just follow up on something else you said, you said that the teachers were not always happy to see this influx of Black students.  How were you aware of that, as a student in the classroom, or were you? 

LS: [00:18:50] I really wasn’t, but at least not at the time.  But in talking with some of my Black friends, they would tell me about [00:19:00] how they were feeling basically disrespected by the teachers.  There were a couple of teachers who had really made no secret of the fact that they weren’t happy about all of this.  Unfortunately, those were often the teachers who were dealing most with the kids who were, let’s say, we have a couple of problems here.  Problem number one is that most of the Black kids who were brought into Lane were immediately diverted into what I’ll term less-academic tracks.  There were very few of them who were put into what we would now think of as honors classes.  In my classes, for example, we had maybe one, two, three Black kids, period, per class.  So most of them were going into the classes where they would learn typing and things like that.  And one of the typing teachers, Virginia [00:20:00] Bowen, was just really nasty to the Black kids in her class.  And that’s the kind of thing that I would hear about. 

PL: [00:20:10] Did you participate in the walk-out? 

LS: [00:20:13] No.  I didn’t even know it was happening. 

GG: [00:20:18] Did you know Charles Alexander? 

LS: [00:20:19] Very well.  Charles was my classmate going back to fourth grade.  

GG: [00:20:28] What about the Wrecking Crew? 

LS: [00:20:32] I’m not sure I know the name.  I know of -- who all was in the Wrecking Crew? 

GG: [00:20:39] That’s what we were going to ask you. 

LS: [00:20:41] I don’t know.  

GG: [00:20:43] What did you know about Robert King? 

LS: [00:20:47] Robert was, well, for one thing, he was a pretty ferocious tackler on the football team. 

GG: [00:20:54] And not that big. 

LS: [00:20:56] And not that big, no.  But he made up [00:21:00] for it with heart.  Robert was also somebody who was active with the Student Human Relations Committee or Council.  And I know he and I had a few classes together.  I can’t recall right now what they were.  I remember one of them was a gym class, and where it was very obvious that he was a much better athlete than I was.  But I think Robert also was one of those who played on our world’s worst basketball team as a good football player, not much of a basketball player. 

GG: [00:21:40] Have you stayed in touch with Bobby? 

LS: [00:21:44] Yeah, yeah. 

GG: [00:21:45] He’s had a very interesting career. 

LS: [00:21:47] Right, he went down to Atlanta for a long time.  He’s still splitting time a little bit between Atlanta and here.  But this is now his -- but he actually did a commercial for me in my city council run. 

GG: [00:22:00] Did he?  I’d forgotten that.  Didn’t see it, I don’t think. 

PL: [00:22:04] You wouldn’t have been in school with George King, right?  He was right --

LS: [00:22:07] He was a year or two ahead of me, I think.  I also knew George.  George was, of course, George King, maybe senior, the older George King, in any event, was a friend of my parents.  And so George King the younger, again, was a year or two ahead of me in school.  So I didn’t really know him very well.  But he was somebody that I knew.  I think he had also worked in Camp Faith, for example.  

PL: [00:22:37] You know, our research has, indicates that Kent Merritt, who became president of the class one year, and in some ways, that’s just a little difficult to put into the perspective of understanding what else was going on.  You had [00:23:00] all kinds of tensions that existed in the school. 

LS: [00:23:03] Well, you have to remember that at Lane at that time, if you were on the football team, you were a step above everybody else.  And so the people who did well, Kent was one, obviously.  Robert King was another, simply by that additional cache.  There was also the place where, and I was just looking back through old Chains [Yearbook] last night, the place where it mattered the most, it seemed was in who got to be a cheerleader.  It was a big deal my second year there, which of course would have been the second year of meaningful integration, when we had one Black cheerleader.  And then by our senior year, the homecoming queen was Scheryl Williams, Black.  [00:24:00] But that was largely because the selections for these things were happening by teachers, not by students.  Because the teachers understood, the administration at that point understood the need to move faster than the student body as a whole was willing to move.  One of the things that changed in that respect was when we got a new principal the second year of integration.  That was Jack Huegel.  And Jack was very much concerned about the racial divide and trying to give students a chance to work things out.  And one of the ways they were doing that was, frankly, they took away some of the power to be as overtly racist as the students had been expressing to that point.  Because if you look at the majority vote of most of the people who [00:25:00] did anything, most of the students who would vote in things like, who would you want to be the homecoming queen or whatever, most of them were white.  Most of them were very white.  And the way the system worked, there would not have been a possibility of somebody like Scheryl being the homecoming queen.  Kind of reminds me of, what was it, Dan Bonner, the basketball player, in his senior year, was chosen at the captain of the basketball team.  And Dan tells the story.  He was sort of a second stringer and rode the bench most of the time.  And he was wondering, he later on asked Terry Holland, how did I get to be chosen captain?  Did they all vote for me?  Terry said, but I counted the votes.  

GG: [00:25:57] So what are your [00:26:00] first memories of 1967, when the large number of Burley students came into Lane?  Talk about what you remember from the first few months.  How did they get started? 

LS: [00:26:15] Well, remember that we had already had a major infusion into Walker.  So it was new to Lane, that there was meaningful integration.  But it wasn’t as new to the students that there was meaningful integration.  So when I went to Walker in eighth grade there was, instead of having a handful of Black kids in seventh grade, as we had at that point, now it was 20 percent or 25, whatever the numbers were.  And it’s just a very different feel.  But then moving to a new school was a very different feel.  I didn’t really have a sense in my mind [00:27:00] of, oh my goodness.  What am I seeing here?  Because everything was so new, and it was so different.  But then I’d also been working in things like the Trinity Project with my parents, and Camp Faith, and so on.  Just getting, and I have to caution you, George.  In some way, I may be an unsatisfactory interviewee in this respect, because I tend not to wallow in the past.  I tend not to think back on things, either with a sense of great appreciation or oh my God, how did that happen?  So I don’t have a real clear recollection of anything dramatic happening, until the walk-out, which again, I remember as being essentially the same timeframe as the assassination of Dr. King, give or take a little bit.  I don’t remember.  I assume the assassination of Dr. King came first, but that’s about the timeframe that I suddenly woke up to [00:28:00] a whole lot of racial issues that had not previously been foremost in my mind. 

GG: [00:28:06] So that would have been the spring following the fall of ’67.  This would have been April or May of --

LS: [00:28:14] Six, seven months after the integration really had occurred.  I was aware of tensions generally.  I was aware that there were white kids who were really being racist towards Black kids.  But I was more conscious of that a couple of years later, as a junior or senior, than as a sophomore.  As a sophomore, I was just wandering around, saying what the heck’s happening here? 

GG: [00:28:47] We’ve seen a number of references to the Consultative Resources Center at UVA.  What can you tell us about the interaction with them? 

LS: [00:29:00] I don’t, I remember the name.  You know who the people were? 

GG: [00:29:07] I don’t, but they did surveys.  And the Lane Times published extracts of what their findings were.  They were very consistent with what you were saying. 

LS: [00:29:21] I don’t have a real clear recollection of that. 

PL: [00:29:26] I think this would have been federally supported money to support, that got housed at UVA, to support integration efforts and to do some of the background research that was necessary.  And they came to Lane, and they talked to students to see what the problems were.  They --

LS: [00:29:48] I have a dim recollection of that having happened. 

PL: [00:29:52] Well, that makes sense.  As a high school student, you probably were not too interested in survey materials anyway. 

GG: [00:30:00] Yeah, one of their findings seemed to be that there was a split between sophomores and then the two more senior grades.  What was that all about? 

LS: [00:30:13] Well, again, it was more a matter of, we had had another year or two to adjust to the fact that we were not a 99 percent white group.  And so I know my own experience with the grade or two above me was that there were not a lot of folks there who I thought of as allies.  And I think that some of these guys were folks who remembered when the eighth grade was still at Lane, because they were eighth graders at Lane, at a time when the rest of us were seventh graders in our [00:31:00] respective elementary schools.  And they had a glorified view of Lane that included the football team’s unbeaten streak and things like that, where they would look back with some fondness to those days.  And at least one person I remember telling me that we were unbeaten until those Black -- they used a different term back then -- until those Black kids came.  Now, one of those Black kids, of course, was Kent Merritt, who was, until they broke his leg midway through our first year there, was certainly the star of the team already, even as a tenth grader.  But that was the first time we lost a game.  Nobody else could remember having lost a game before.  Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.  

GG: [00:31:55] Some students were asked to make suggestions about what to do to solve [00:32:00] problems.  And so the surveyors globbed onto instituting courses on Negro culture and history, German, teaching German, teaching Russian, as well as other languages, and sex ed.  

LS: [00:32:22] An interesting juxtaposition of choices there. 

GG: [00:32:26] Right, right.  I’m not sure it was in that order.  But the students also suggested, according to this summary, that more racially oriented clubs, that would focus on grievances.  What about, what does that mean? 

LS: [00:32:46] Well, part of that was -- let me answer that in a slightly different way.  There was also a move in my junior year, ’68–’69 year, to [00:33:00] radically change the way that student government ran.  And how people were elected to be on the SCA, student council.  And at one point, we wound up basically saying, if you want to be on the SCA, come be on the SCA.  It’s not even a question of getting elected.  Just come.  And the idea being, if you care enough, we want you.  And that was a major thing, too, because again, any time you’ve got a majority group that is trying to elect only one person, you’re only going to elect a member of the majority group.  And so the SCA, our first year, was basically entirely white.  And by the second year, it had essentially tripled in size.  And anybody who wanted to come could come.  And that was an opportunity for folks to air grievances, to talk about some of these things openly, [00:34:00] and not only through the student council, but then that also dovetailed with the Unity Weekend thing that we were doing in November and provided an outlet for a lot of that sort of discussion.  That was also, I think, around the time that the Lane Times folks started thinking, gee, we need to loosen up a little bit on what we’re covering.  And that may be why they decided they could tolerate a column from me from time to time. 

PL: [00:34:33] Was there a teacher advisor in charge of the Lane Times who was very open to these things?  Or did the students basically just run the newspaper themselves? 

LS: [00:34:45] No, the year that I was involved, there was a Mr. [Gwathmey?] who was involved.  He was a recent graduate of UVA, and I remember hearing that he, [00:35:00] when there were various student demonstrations in the spring of 1970, when he was on the faculty at Lane, he was up at the university and wound up getting chased behind a tree by the cops and eventually arrested.  And although he was never charged with anything, that was back in the days when George Bailey was basically rounding up everybody and putting them in the back of a U-Haul truck, including the pizza delivery man and the couple on their way back from a formal dance.  Anyway, so --

GG: [00:35:40] So the Mayflower van was the --

LS: [00:35:43] Was the van?  Okay, not a U-Haul. 

GG: [00:35:45] They had the first and second trips of the Mayflower.  

LS: [00:35:50] Anyway, so that’s the same story.  So Mr. [Gwathmey] wound up being whooshed up into that, which just tells us, number one, that he was a fairly recent graduate from UVA.  [00:36:00] Number two, that he was interested, as a reporter, in what was going on.  But he was all, that would be just miles away from what we would have expected the year or two before. 

PL: [00:36:14] So he was open to the student newspaper --

LS: [00:36:17] Yeah, absolutely, yeah. 

PL: [00:36:19] Issues of race and being --

LS: [00:36:22] The editor-in-chief that year was Martha [DeLaine?], who was a good friend of mine.  She tied for number one in the class.  In all my calculus classes and everything like that, and she was great.  And she was also very tolerant of me in that respect, encouraged me.  

GG: [00:36:43] Good, good.  Going back to the committee’s meetings and the way they were populated, you said come on out.  Everybody’s welcome.  So what would a gathering like that look like?  And what were some [00:37:00] of the things, what were some of the grievances that came out of that? 

LS: [00:37:06] I’m thinking back in particular to meetings that we were having in the ’68–’69 school year, when we, with Mr. Eagle’s blessing, said we’re gonna have a student council that just, anybody who wants to get involved, come get involved.  And we would meet in the auditorium.  And it was typically 100, 150 kids there.  And I remember wrangling a lot about what our new constitution was going to look like and trying to make sure that things were as open as we could make them, that you didn’t have to have certain prerequisites before you were allowed to participate, [00:38:00] and things like that.  And the result was that we had some fairly intense discussions between people who were substantially more conservative, and folks who were substantially more liberal.  And we wound up, as I recall, with a constitution that we had drafted that was considerably more liberal than what had gone on before.  And again, the whole idea was, if you care enough to come to the meeting, you’re a part of the solution.  And we wanted that attitude to prevail.  And the issues that were mentioned, for example, specifically about Black culture and Black history kinds of things, that didn’t happen.  But there were some activities that were after-school meetings of various sorts.  And I know at least a couple of times, we had some lectures by [00:39:00] folks coming in from out of town.  One meeting that strikes me, I think it was a part of the Unity Weekend effort, was somebody from the SCLC came up to talk to us.  And that was all pretty cool, because anything with the SCLC moniker was revolutionary.  That’s right.  Admittedly, it was just a meeting in the Lane High School cafeteria.  But hey, it was a step in the right direction. 

GG: [00:39:30] The Lane Time of January 27, 1969, after one meeting and discussion -- I don’t really know who was out and who called it and so on -- but their direct quote was, “Some students suggested that segregation of the classes or a complete resegregation of the school would solve the problem.”  Was that ever [00:40:00] talked about seriously? 

LS: [00:40:02] No.  That just shows you the reactionary aspect. 

GG: [00:40:08] Were people in your position aware of the call for that? 

LS: [00:40:18] Yes. 

GG: [00:40:19] So it was explicitly, somebody took it seriously enough to raise it.  And people found out about it and said, no way. 

LS: [00:40:28] Well, there were a lot of folks who were expressing frustration with what they perceived as the derangement of the natural order.  And that’s what they wanted to go back to.  And if they couldn’t go back all the way to sending the Black kids back to Burley, let’s at least make it so we don’t have to interact with them as much.  And then we won’t be wanting to fight with them so much.  That was a lot of the tenor of [00:41:00] it, was a sense of, there was always this undercurrent of, within certain circles, of you’re just one hard block in the tenth-grade gym class away from having some kind of a fight.  I remember at least one instance, again, this rec league basketball, of an all-white team playing basically an all-Black team.  And at some point, one of the white guys ends up on the floor with one of the Black kids just beating on him.  Deservedly, I hasten to add, as one who observed the events.  The white guy was, I still know all these people.  And I don’t know how they are right now, but back then, there was a lot of ugliness going on.  And that was just reality. 

GG: [00:41:55] In November of 1968, there was a [00:42:00] Black student who struck a white assistant principal in a confrontation in the hall.  And this is, again, all Lane Time reporting.  This attack followed a Black student walk-out with minimal white student support.  Willie Barnett was thought to be the assistant principal. 

LS: [00:42:22] That would sound reasonable. 

GG: [00:42:24] And he apparently was close to a cohort of white angry parents.  The student was convicted and suspended.  But what about that incident?  

LS: [00:42:44] I was not, I was aware generally of things like that.  Willie Barnett was the, I don’t want to say the cause.  That’s the wrong way to put it.  He was the [00:43:00] flashpoint for a lot of the tensions because he was sort of demoted, in a sense, to being assistant principal in charge of discipline.  And that necessarily meant that if there were issues, obviously of discipline or of truancy or being late to class or some white teacher being upset with the lip that she was getting from somebody who was Black, that Willie became the person who had to deal with that sort of stuff.  He was old-line white Charlottesville.  And the old-line white Charlottesville people saw him as their, not just their ally, but as the person they were sending into the jousting match as their champion.  And so I think in many ways, [00:44:00] both he was put in a position and he allowed himself to be put in the position of being the champion of, frankly, the bigots.  That’s one of the things that ultimately, as we talked about changes that needed to get made, one of those changes was that Willie Barnett had to get further demoted.  I don’t remember whether he actually got fired after that year, or whether they just said, okay, you can be the athletic director but don’t do anything else.  Around then is when Freddie Murray came in as an assistant principal.  And he wound up being the assistant principal.  If you want to look at it in terms of balance of forces, he was the assistant principal that the Black kids felt was their ally.  Of course, he was Black.  And that made a huge difference right there.  And Mr. Eagle, I think, came to [00:45:00] be perceived as much more even-handed in all of this than his predecessor, Mr. Nichols. 

GG: [00:45:06] There was apparently a motorcycle club, and Willie Barnett was thought to be their more or less person on the faculty. 

LS: [00:45:16] Every club had to have a sponsor, had to have a faculty sponsor. 

GG: [00:45:21] And he was the one for them.  

LS: [00:45:25] A bunch of Belmont boys, basically.  

PL: [00:45:28] Do you want to explain that?  We’ve heard about the Belmont boys, but if you could explain. 

LS: [00:45:32] The Belmont boys is, obviously they’re folks who grew up in Belmont.  They are, in many cases, there was folks who had gone to Clark.  And they had been together since very early times.  At that particular point, because we didn’t yet have places like Friendship Court, for example, that are now part of the Clark School District, at that point, the Clark School District was very [00:46:00] white.  And they were relatively lower economic class, relatively less university-oriented, and very much old-line Charlottesville.  I don’t mean old-money Charlottesville, just long-time Charlottesville residents.  And so they were a group, and it was not necessarily a specific hierarchy.  But you just kind of knew the white guys coming from Belmont, that that’s who you’re dealing with. 

PL: [00:46:34] It would be sort of tough in that. 

LS: [00:46:35] A little tough, yeah. 

PL: [00:46:37] Does the name Anna Holden mean anything to you?  

LS: [00:46:40] No. 

PL: [00:46:42] She wrote a book about this period.  I myself haven’t looked at it.  I know the word bus stop is in it, but I think she really explores a lot of this in it.  It was she who talked in that book about [00:47:00] Black students assaulting a white assistant principal.  So I just [wanted to?] know if she would have been an activist or something. 

LS: [00:47:08] The name doesn’t mean anything to me. 

PL: [00:47:10] Okay, that’s fine.  

GG: [00:47:14] So what about fights?  How many were there really? 

LS: [00:47:20] I only witnessed the one that was off the grounds, so to speak, in the rec league basketball game.  I kept hearing about fights.  I was aware of one white guy in my senior year, who kept a baseball bat in his car, just in case.  I was not aware of him ever using it.  But he talked a good game.  [00:48:00] So I know that there were altercations.  One class, in tenth-grade gym class, was one place where they seemed to happen with some frequency, because you’ve got --

GG: [00:48:14] Was that white on Black, or Black on white, or a mixture? 

LS: [00:48:18] Yes, yes.  But I frankly, I didn’t get, let’s see.  I was in tenth-grade gym.  I was also in eleventh-grade gym, because I had missed out on a gym class earlier.  So I didn’t see any fights like that.  I’ll tell you, one of the other things that happened around this time that I remember was that there was also an issue of the way in which resources were being allocated between athletics and academics.  And this was something that was talked about within student circles.  It [00:49:00] was talked about at school board meetings, and parents’ involvement, and so on.  And it was interesting that when I, I remember I wrote a column for my Lane Time piece, where I was talking about the academics versus athletics, the problem.  And the then-football coach, assistant football coach, Joe Benglar, was also my eleventh-grade gym teacher.  Said I should come out for the football team.  He wanted to make me an offensive lineman.  Now, mind you at that point, I was 5’10”, 140 pounds, soaking wet with rocks in my pockets, as Frank Howard used to say.  And I did not interpret that as either a sincere effort to have me be an outstanding athlete or frankly very conductive to my health.  [00:50:00] I chose not to.  

GG: [00:50:04] There was apparently a grade minimum that was required for some extracurricular activities, like being a cheerleader and like being a football player. 

LS: [00:50:15] I was not aware of that.

GG: [00:50:18] One of the, what we’ve seen was that one of the demands of the students, the Black students coming over was, we’ve been frozen out because we’re new to this school.  We’re not getting the grades that the white students are.  And so apparently at some point -- I don’t know whether this was formally or informally -- but the administration lowered the bar. 

LS: [00:50:46] I was aware that after my first year there, going into the second year, I was aware that the criteria for selection had changed, was not aware of the details.  [00:51:00] And the result was that the following year, there was at least one Black cheerleader.  And the following year after that, there were two Black cheerleaders. 

PL: [00:51:10] Was the first one Corlis Anderson, Corlis Turner-Anderson? 

LS: [00:51:14] I don’t think so.  I think she was later.  She was younger than I am, I believe.  She was a classmate, I think, of my sister Kathy’s, two years behind me. 

PL: [00:51:25] Yeah, we’ve interviewed her. 

[Extraneous material redacted.]

LS: [00:51:29] You should talk to Scheryl, Scheryl Williams. 

PL: [00:51:31] I have talked to Scheryl Williams.  And she is a little resistant about this.  So you talk to Scheryl Williams, and you tell her that we’re doing a good job.  I don’t mind contacting her again.  Anyway. 

LS: [00:51:50] Okay.  Have you talked to Edwina Losey, Edwina Saint Rose?  Do you know Edwina? 

PL: [00:51:58] Yes, I do. 

LS: [00:52:00] She was also a classmate of mine that year.  Turned into a Republican. 

GG: [00:52:08] Was there any sort of welcoming committee when the Burley folks came to Lane?  Was there any --

LS: [00:52:17] Not that I was ever aware of. 

GG: [00:52:18] Any preparation? 

LS: [00:52:21] Not that I’m aware of.  Realistically, I wouldn’t have been. 

GG: [00:52:27] Right.  You’d think, though, that most people would understand the possible outcome of the first few days of that and would have wanted to prepare for it. 

LS: [00:52:42] Yeah, and there may well have been.  I just don’t know. 

GG: [00:52:46] We haven’t bumped into it.  

LS: [00:52:48] The person who would probably have been best able to speak to that would have been Henry Mitchell, which hasn’t been an [00:53:00] option for a decade now. 

GG: [00:53:01] Right.  Were police officers really stationed in the halls? 

LS: [00:53:07] I don’t remember them.  Might have been on occasion, but not on a regular basis.  Remember, I was busy being nerdy.  

GG: [00:53:24] Hang on one second.  I think I’ve got something over here that I want to look at.  We talked about Willie Barnett.  We talked about the grade minimum.  We talked about physical fights.  So looking back, do you think that segregation, desegregation worked? 

LS: [00:53:52] Well, looking back, I would say that it wasn’t handled well.  I think [00:54:00] again, you also have to look at one other bit of perspective here, that the superintendent who had basically made the decisions that led to the desegregation and more meaningful integration, got run out of town on a rail, George Tramontin.  During the year, there was more talk of fights during the first year that I was at Walker, when we were down at Jefferson School in the mornings.  I used to go to school from eight to 12:15, and come back and I would be back home by about one o’clock.  And since there was no such thing as talk radio per se at that point, or certainly the kind of television programming, people would listen to Community Conversations, with Charlie [00:55:00] Huddle.  And Charlie Huddle would have people, people would be calling in to talk about how awful things were at Walker and Buford.  There were fights all the time, and blah blah blah.  And I would call in to say, I’m not seeing these fights.  I don’t know what they’re talking about.  And I looked on it then as an attempt by the white community to drum up so much inflammatory stuff that ultimately, they ran George out of town.  And years later, of course George was the father-in-law to David Toscano.  His son Court was in my class at Walker at that point, and his daughter Nancy, David’s wife, was a couple of years younger.  And I remember [00:56:00] a number of times after George had moved back to town, and his wife also, that they, getting together with them and Nancy in particular, still had fond memories of my having leapt to her father’s defense on the radio, on WINA.  The tensions were potent.  They were manifesting themselves in a lot of really ugly ways, and some frankly, an awful lot of lies were getting told.  

GG: [00:56:39] So what do you consider to be your legacy for your time at Lane? 

LS: [00:56:46] People have asked me about what I want to have my legacy be, in city council.  I say, I don’t think about legacies particularly.  I’m thinking very much in the moment.  But --

GG: [00:57:00] It’s not immodest to look back 40 years and figure, I made a difference here. 

LS: [00:57:06] Well, one of the differences that I think that I helped to make, I think that I, along with some other people who were involved at that time, were able to start defusing some tensions.  We didn’t get all the way there, but we started.  And sometimes, the first step is the hardest.  And so by helping to take that first step, I think that that made a difference.  I know my sister Kathy was the senior class president two years later.  And even by that time, things were different.  She had Black friends and Black, there were Black friends in the cohort of her friends, even in, they even had a high school sorority back then.  They admitted their first Black [00:58:00] members.  These are things that wouldn’t have happened without some first steps having been taken. 

GG: [00:58:09] Your witness.  

PL: [00:58:11] This project is called Race and Sports: The Desegregation of Charlottesville and Albemarle County Schools.  So you said something earlier about Kent’s role, and that allowing him to become, in a sense, president.  What would you say, in your own mind, was the impact of sports on helping or not helping with the desegregation process? 

LS: [00:58:44] I think the football team and the basketball team, because those were two activities that a lot of students came to.  Obviously they played, but there were fans there.  And for [00:59:00] white students to be rooting for a Black basketball player to make a basket is a step that, a decade earlier, would not have happened.  And that has to have some impact, I think, for us to be able to say, as white students, gee.  That Kent Merritt is really an amazing guy.  Not just gee, he’s fast, which he was.  But he, there were so many other aspects about Kent that were impressive.  And very smart guy, and he was a nice guy, and a good athlete, and everything else.  You can’t see somebody as a whole person if you’re not seeing them at all.  

PL: [00:59:51] So that’s, I think you’ve said that very well and in a meaningful way, so thank you.  But [01:00:00] we, I guess in this project, we’ve also talked to people.  You were a thespian.  And we’ve also talked to people who were involved in choral groups and things like that.  Basically, you say the same thing.  People ended up getting together, making something happen, [producing?] something, whether it was on the athletic field or through a choral group, et cetera.  And they say well, that also helped with the desegregation process, that people were cooperating together.  They were doing cooperative activity.  

LS: [01:00:46] There was one really interesting thing that happened that year, my junior year.  We had, through the Player’s Club, we were doing a one-act [01:01:00] play, and for the statewide One-Act Play Festival.  And the one-act play we were doing was called The Lonesome Train.  And it was about how both Black community and the white community responded to the death of Abraham Lincoln.  And it was a musical one-act play.  And we had the white folks on one side of the stage, and Black folks on the other side of the stage.  And whoever was in the spotlight at that point, you knew which side you were dealing with.  And the white side, I was one of the white kids who was involved.  And we were supposed to be a bunch of farmers, Kansas.  And I remember we had a square dance going on.  I remember I had a solo, my first solo as a singer.  But the Black setting was in a church service, where the preacher of the service was Nehemiah Brown.  [01:02:00] And Nehemiah comes from a family with preachers.  And he knew how to be a preacher, and he was really good.  And we had some wonderful singers on both sides.  But it was, obviously we had to practice this thing for a couple of months.  And we were working together for a couple of months.  And it wasn’t just okay, we’re going to practice the white guys today, and we’re going to practice the Black guys tomorrow.  We were all there all the time.  And it was a very positive bonding experience in that way. 

PL: [01:02:35] People came to the play. 

LS: [01:02:36] People came to the play.  

PL: [01:02:37] Saw that activity in a way that people who came to basketball and football games also saw.  I guess sports has a somewhat different resonance, in terms of cheering the team on. 

LS: [01:02:53] Understand, it matters in some way, not hugely, [01:03:00] but again, it’s a step in the right direction if you’ve got white folks cheering for a Black football player.  Better to be seen at all than to not be seen at all.  

GG: [01:03:17] Thank you.  You know, one of your great strengths as a person and a civic person in Charlottesville is you’ve been absolutely consistent for, what 40 years. 

LS: [01:03:31] Yep, or 50 or 60. 

PL: [01:03:35] What brought you back to Charlottesville after being away? 

LS: [01:03:40] Well, so I went to Stanford, worked for a couple of years.  I couldn’t decide between following in my father’s footsteps and going to business school, or following in my father’s footsteps and going to law school.  Dad had a law degree, and then he came to teach at the Darden school.  And I finally decided on law.  [01:04:00] And then I had to decide, okay, where am I going to law school?  The only two places that admitted me were Michigan and Virginia.  But Virginia did not regard me as a Virginia resident at that point, because I had been living in California out of college for two years.  And I had not been paying state income tax in Virginia in those two years.  And my father was the chair of the committee to resolve disputes over Virginia in-state status.  And he basically said, I can’t.  I can’t touch this.  So if I had a choice between going to Virginia on out-of-state tuition or Michigan on out-of-state tuition, I decided to go to Michigan.  And what I really tell people is I went there to meet my wife.  And so she and I met the second week of law school.  We got married the day after we graduated.  So we graduated May 12 of, it’s in 1979.  Got married May 13.  [01:05:00] We were trying to decide, okay, where do we want to end up?  And we decided, we had a list of criteria.  And we knew that [we] eventually wanted to be in some place kind of like Charlottesville, in terms of being able to balance work life and home life and raise kids and family and all the rest of that stuff.  And we both had job offers in, fairly well-paying job offers in Chicago.  She had a much better offer, in terms of what she would have been doing.  I think I would have been doing plaintiff’s anti-trust work or something like that.  I thought, oh.  And we finally decided we would take about a 75 percent cut in pay to start in Charlottesville, rather than work for a few years and then go to someplace like Charlottesville.  And so, let’s just start there.  And so we decided to come here. 

PL: [01:05:58] And that’s the rest of the story.  [01:06:00] Lorenzo, do you have some questions? 

LORENZO DICKERSON: [01:06:03] No, I don’t have any. 

PL: [01:06:05] Oh really?  That’s unusual.  Okay.  

LS: [01:06:13] I wish I had a clearer memory of some of those things.  I can say with confidence that it was not interfered with by alcohol or drugs or anything else, because I didn’t do any of that stuff. 

PL: [01:06:27] This is out of context, but I just wondered, did you know about a student underground newspaper called The Blast? 

LS: [01:06:36] I was aware of it.  I don’t have any recollection, no.  

PL: [01:06:41] We’re good.  

LS: [01:06:43] You all probably know more about my history than I do. 

PL: [01:06:47] We know a lot of the background stuff now.  But everyone has a perspective and a point of view.  And we know you were really an activist then. 

LS: [01:07:00] Well, and one of the other things, I was also, again sort of the family history here.  My mother was the leader of the first integrated Girl Scout troop around here.  I was the patrol leader of the first integrated patrol in the first integrated troop of Boy Scouts, basically any place south of Alexandria.  And that was, the interesting story behind that simply in the way that Henry Mitchell and [Harcourt Waller?] and my parents and a bunch of other people hatched this plot.  I didn’t even realize that I was a key part of the plot until 20 years later.  But they decided that I should, I had left one troop and was looking around.  And my parents said, well, come and join the Saint Paul’s troop.  I said, okay.  What the [01:08:00] heck.  And then they made me the patrol leader.  And our patrol was based of eight kids, three of whom were Black.  Because they felt some certainty that I would treat them fairly and appropriately and so on.  And not that there was really a concern, because it was a pretty liberal group.  But anyway, I don’t know whether you know Richard Johnson.  What’s her name, mother of Brown, [Lelia?] Brown.  Anyway, the lived down on Eighth Street.  Richard was one of my scouts and wound up being an Eagle Scout in the long run.  Good guy. 

PL: [01:08:41] So should we say your leadership in high school gave you the training for doing what you’re doing now? 

LS: [01:08:48] I make no such claims.  

PL: [01:08:52] Okay, well thank you very much.  You are a very busy man.  To take the time to do this is --

LS: [01:09:00] Happy to help. 

GG: [01:09:00] Very generous.