50
Years of Progress Since Brown
in the Southern Virginia Rural Town
of My Youth
By Rudolph Lewis May 17, 1954 (the
Brown Case decision) signaled no special hope in my family
history. Married in 1926, Daddy then (48) and Mama (42) had been
sharecroppers for two decades for the Creath family. In 1948,
year of my birth, they purchased ten acres ($100 a acre) from
Jerusalem Church. Like pioneers, they cleared the trees and the
brush (with crosscut saw, ax, grubbing hoe, mule and wagon), dug
a well (Mama pulling up the clay and mud). Then Daddy built his
wife a house, four rooms on the first level and a livable
upstairs.
That house burned down in 1954. We, the four
of us, then lived in a one-room cinderblock building that Daddy
had built for a store and a juke joint. We waited impatiently for
Daddy to gather the resources to complete the new eight-room house with a livable
upstairs. I was five and my sister (aunt) Annie was fourteen. That fall
I began first grade at Creath, No. 5, a two-room school for
colored children, grades 1 through 7. Annie in the 10th
grade attended Waverly Training School (for the colored)
by bus, forty miles away at the other end of Sussex County.
At five years old in May 1954 I knew nothing of race,
and the Supreme Court decision was not a pertinent topic of
discussion in our household. Mama and Daddy were not readers of
the Richmond Times-Dispatch newspapers and we wouldn’t
get a television until August of 1958. Mama left Creath in her
third year and Daddy boasted he only attended one day.
Both however could read and write, probably
at about a sixth grade level. Daddy was a biblical authority.
Mama was then working as a cook at Jarratt Motel (since 1948),
kept a garden, canned food and helped Daddy farm the land in
back of the house. He also worked at John Smith’s sawmill, did
odd jobs, and built houses when the opportunity presented
itself. He was a Jack-of-all-Trades. There was nothing he
didn’t know and couldn’t do. At least, that was my
estimation of him, then.
We lived about four miles off Route 301, then
the thoroughfare, north and south, on a dirt road in the
midst of woods, swamps, and small fields. Where the road ended
was our home and
Jerusalem Baptist Church (founded 1870) and its new cemetery
(founded 1948), at the intersection of another dirt road that
led to another section of 301, about three and half miles away.
So visually the area was in a V-shape, more
precisely, a Y-shape, for if you turned right, the Jerusalem
Church Road would take you through more woods across railroad
tracks to Gray, a train stop and a granary. As students, we
turned left for Creath, a white clapboard school partially
founded about 1910 by the leaders of Jerusalem. Land for the
school was donated by Luther Creath, a large white landowner in
the area.
September 1954, I began Creath. It had one
teacher Miss Margaret Trisvan, who would later teach me French
and history in high school. She taught all seven grades. To get
to Creath was a two-mile walk from Jerusalem, crossing Sansee
Swamp. Some students like the Stiths and the Massenbergs, who
lived on the other side of 301, walked about five miles to
Creath. Though Creath had two rooms, we only used one-room. We
were then only about fifty students in seven grades.
Hardly, anyone knew and certainly none in our
little village had running water and an indoor toilets, neither
did the school, which was heated by a cast iron stove that
burned coal and sat in a sandbox in the middle of the floor with
a long extended tin pipe that ran across the room to a chimney.
In winter, the older students were responsible for making the
fire and we all joined in in cleaning the floors with motor oil
in order to keep down the dust. Out back and down the hill at
opposite ends of a make-shift baseball field near the woods were
the two outhouses, for boys and girls. We knew nothing of basketball then, a sport
made popular by television.
Of course, we lived quite isolated lives then,
the church the center of social and religious life. None had a
telephone, though we had electricity and a radio. Yet there were
still those then who used kerosene lamps. I rarely had any
contact with whites, unless Daddy drove his truck up to Jarratt
Town or to Emporia. But for me, such trips were infrequent.
Petersburg was thirty-five miles away and Richmond, fifty-five
– then that was a major trip, almost like being 400 miles
away. So I had no personal contacts with whites until I was
about twenty years old, though I had my first white teachers
(including Thomas Cripps) at Morgan State College in the late
60s.
I first began to notice whites as different
and special
in our walk back home from Creath. White elementary students
rode the bus and we walked. The older Creath students schooled
us younger ones to get way off the road when the yellow
bus came rumbling by. The students on the bus would toss
missiles out the window and yell all kind of profanities. But
that was only a momentary static, like waiting for a poisonous
snake to cross the road.
Unlike Prince Edward, Sussex County did not
close its schools in response to the Supreme Court order to
desegregate with "all deliberate speed." The County
accommodated the Negroes. That manifested itself in the County
building a new high school in 1959 for its Negro citizens. Generations
before mine had to travel to the other end of the county for
high school instruction. So after I finished Creath's seventh
grade, I traveled only twenty miles to Central High, the most
modern high school building in the county.
Up in Jarratt, four miles away, there was a
high school for whites only. As a child, I don’t recall anyone
complaining about this situation. The new high school provided
jobs for many women who were members of Jerusalem. The school
needed cooks, janitors, as well as bus drivers. Women who only
had opportunities to work in the hot fields for, at most, six
dollars a day, could make at least $40 a week nine months of the
year.
When I graduated in 1965, Central High was
still an all-black school. Of the two hundred eight-graders that
began in 1960, only about 85 graduated on time. Some joined the
military and went to Vietnam, and if they survived returned to
Sussex and often married their high school sweethearts. Many
joined those who obtained jobs at Johns Mansville (a wood
processing plant) in Jarratt or
at chemical plants in Hopewell. A few like me left Sussex for
the North – Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, Jersey,
or New York – seeking a broader range of opportunities.
Central High “integrated” probably in the
early 1970s. Private white schools developed, so only a few
working class
white students attended and, of course, the staff became
integrated. All the one and two room clapboard schools, like Creath, were torn down
or turned into houses like Rivers Mill, and centralized modern elementary
schools were built. They too created employment for local
blacks. Many believe the school instruction deteriorated once
“integration” was established.
Though Sussex County overwhelmingly has a
black majority (since the mid-19th century), the
county continues to be ruled by a white minority of large
landholders or businessmen. Big machinery and chemicals have
eliminated the need for massive numbers of black field hands.
The mules of my youth have disappeared. The County still
provides few opportunities for its graduates so the county
continues to maintain a population of about 15,000.
With the addition of a new prison within the last
ten years and the need for a staff of guards, janitors, and
cooks, the population of Jarratt has begun to move toward a
1,000 with an influx from North Carolina of blacks and
Hispanics. The new state prison made it possible for the town to
develop public utilities, sewage and running water. Thus a
housing project has sprung up and the building of homes has
increased.
Jarratt has become primarily a bedroom community,
with whites moving into what had been all-black areas, and
blacks having to go outside the town and the county to obtain
high-paying employment. Though majority black, Jarratt has a
white mayor, a Owen, a descendant of one of the large white
landowners on whose farm my family worked before and while I was
a kid.
Of course, with Interstate 95, a superhighway (65
mph) and the new inexpensive technologies of telephones, VCRs,
satellite dishes, computers, Jarratt has connected itself
integrally to the vices of the large cities. Those who
left forty or fifty years ago for the big cities and decent
wages have returned in their retirement to build homes and live
out their final days. In general the population is getting older
as families become smaller and smaller.
As elsewhere, Jarratt suffers from low wages,
increasing crime, and drug addiction. In the town of my youth,
fifty-years of progress have not change the basic power
relationships, significantly.
posted May 2004 |
