How Norfolk ended school segregation — then created it again

Norfolk desegregated its schools 62 years ago last week.

The first Black teenager to set foot in the formerly all-white Maury High School, Louis Cousins, always wanted people to know he didn’t integrate the school, as some would tell him he had done.

He desegregated it.

There’s a big difference, his friend told The Virginian-Pilot last year after Cousins died at the age of 76.

Cousins was one of just 17 Black students, and the fight to open the schoolhouse doors to them was a pitched battle. The state closed schools for nearly a year rather than let Black students attend.

White Virginians’ “Massive Resistance” didn’t end when schools desegregated. Norfolk maintains segregated schools to this day because most students are zoned to attend schools in their neighborhoods, many of which were intentionally segregated to limit school integration and still bear the scars of decades of disinvestment and thwarted opportunity.

Nearly seven decades after the Supreme Court ordered Virginia and other states to integrate schools “with all deliberate speed,” a fifth of public school students in Norfolk attend schools that are segregated by one federal measure, with more than 75% of students of the same race. In seven schools, 90% of students or more are Black. Some schools are among the most segregated in the state.

Black families predicted this would happen ever since the city declared in the 1970s that official school segregation was over. They repeated the prediction when Norfolk ended its mandatory desegregation program for elementary school students in the 1980s, becoming the first in the country to be released from federal orders to desegregate. And they repeated it again in the early 2000s when the middle school desegregation program was targeted.

Their warnings weren’t heeded.

In Norfolk and elsewhere, researchers say school segregation is worsening. Across the state, Black and Brown students are more likely now than they were 15 years ago to attend almost entirely non-white schools that tend to have higher poverty, fewer resources and fewer course offerings, according to a report released last fall by the Commonwealth Institute.

“Virginia has a really long history of passing both overt and covert racist policies to segregate schools, and we’re still seeing the effects of that today,” said Kathy Mendes, the study’s co-author. “We’re in another chapter of school segregation. It’s not something we left behind with Brown v. Board.”

One of the areas Mendes’ report highlighted as a place to watch? Norfolk’s St. Paul’s redevelopment.

Today, the city is in the early stages of an ambitious overhaul of some of its most segregated neighborhoods, a billion-dollar project that ultimately will mean moving thousands of residents, including about 2,200 children, and razing public housing communities that include about 1,700 homes.

What redevelopment will mean for those children or their schools isn’t clear. The city aims to create new neighborhoods that are more racially and economically integrated.

But so far, most of the children who’ve moved and transferred to new schools still attend segregated ones, School Board members were told last week.

As Norfolk aims to remake a huge swath of the city, The Pilot is continuing Dividing Lines, a project looking at how the city became segregated and where it might go next. You can read more at PilotOnline.com/dividinglines.

Integrated schools — for a while

After Virginia and Norfolk reopened its schools in 1959, they were integrated — so the popular story goes. In reality, it took significantly more legal wrangling before more than token desegregation occurred, and Black families seeking equal opportunities for their children have faced resistance at every turn.

By the 1965-66 school year, 90% of Norfolk’s Black and white students still attended schools where their own race made up at least 90% of the enrollment.

That held until Black parents filed suit against the school system in 1970 to force broader integration. They challenged the school zones that replicated residential segregation patterns.

This led to the mandatory desegregation plans that many today just call “busing,” the vehicle for overcoming school segregation having become shorthand for the plans themselves.

Close to 50,000 Black and white students in near-equal numbers were bused to schools outside their neighborhoods beginning in 1972. Under the new plan, just one of the city’s 39 elementary schools would have been considered segregated.

It was a brief victory for those who’d argued separate schools were inherently unequal, that all students would benefit from diverse learning environments.

Norfolk declared success just three years later, and a federal judge agreed, saying the district had removed all evidence of its formerly white and Black school systems and was now one unified system.

It didn’t stay that way long. The district started dismantling its desegregation plans soon after.

Segregation’s return

If the city ended its desegregation plans for elementary school-aged children, some predicted, it would bring back white families who’d left the city in part because of “busing.” Then a more racially diverse city would result in more racially diverse schools, the argument went.

The still relatively newly incorporated cities like Virginia Beach and Chesapeake were growing fast. Norfolk, like many urban areas of the time, saw its share of white residents drop. Between 1960 and 1980, the number of white people in the city fell by nearly 30%.

The suburbs were appealing to middle-class families of both races, but the discussion in the 1980s about how cities could lure people back centered only on white families. David Armor, a sociologist hired by the School Board, argued ending busing would bring those families back.

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On that basis, a U.S. District Court judge OK’d the school district’s plans, which had been challenged by Black parents including Paul Riddick, who a few years later would be elected to the City Council, where he’s served ever since, representing many of the city’s poorest — and most segregated — neighborhoods.

Practically overnight, the brief period of desegregated elementary schools brought about by busing ended. The first school year without mandatory busing, 10 of the district’s 35 elementary schools were 90% or more Black and three were just as white.

The white families predicted to bring their children back to Norfolk’s public schools?

They never materialized.

Today, the city’s population is split evenly between white and Black residents. But the public schools are a very different story: just under 60% Black and about 20% white.

This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.

Sara Gregory, 757-469-7484, sara.gregory@pilotonline.com