Carol Swann (on the right) and Gloria Mead walk toward Chandler Junior High School (now the Richmond Community High School building) with Gloria’s mother, Florence Mead, and Carol’s father, Frank Swann. (Photo from the Anderson Collection courtesy The Valentine)
On the surface, it looked as if the racial desegregation of Richmond Public Schools happened smoothly. Unlike the scene the Little Rock Nine had encountered three years earlier, there was no screaming, spitting crowd waiting for 12-year-old Carol Irene Swann and 13-year-old Gloria Jean Mead when they walked up to Chandler Junior High School on Sept. 6, 1960, each accompanied by a parent.
“It was an absolutely normal day with the exception of reporters, photographers and the police,” the school’s principal, John B. Madden, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch afterward.
Still, tension simmered.
Before the two girls ever set foot in the school, the Swann and Mead families endured weeks of harassing phone calls. In August, before the start of the school year, the Times-Dispatch published a front-page article with the headline “Two Negroes Assigned to Chandler High Here.” The article included the home addresses for both girls.
Swann-Daniels, now a retired educator living in North Brunswick, New Jersey, talked with me during a recent visit to Richmond about her experiences as one of the first black students to integrate schools here. She remembers that some of the phone calls her family received were lewd, and she didn’t always understand what the callers meant.
Robert Mead, a younger brother of the late Gloria Jean Mead Jinadu, was 9 years old when his sister — known in the family as Jean — went to Chandler. He, too, remembers the ominous calls.
“I was not allowed to pick up the phone,” Mead, now a psychologist living in New York City, says during a phone interview. “Sometimes we would sit there and the phone would ring and ring. Anytime the phone rang, there was a sense of dread.”
Robert Mead and his younger sister, Patricia, say that because of the family's role in school integration, their father faced harassment at the furniture plant where he did the work of a plumber, but was classified as a lower-ranking pipe-fitter.
"The grief he got was from white employees and administrators for stepping outside the bounds of what they considered for an African-American in that time period," says Patricia Mead, a professor in the engineering department at Norfolk State University.
That caused additional stress and anxiety at home, Robert Mead says. "My father seemed irritated and angry, and didn't have a good outlet for that."
The integration of Chandler took place during a tumultuous time in Richmond and throughout the South. For years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Virginia had resisted school desegregation through its Massive Resistance laws and the closing of some public schools.
A sit-in at the Thalhimers department store lunch counter and restaurant on Feb. 22, 1960, had resulted in the arrest of 34 Virginia Union University students. Two days later, on Feb. 24, a crowd of about 1,600 people attended a Richmond School Board hearing, overflowing the auditorium at the old John Marshall High School downtown onto the lawn outside (now the site of the John Marshall Courts Building), the Times-Dispatch reported. The board was considering whether to convert the all-white Chandler into a school for black students.
At the meeting, a Highland Park druggist who opposed the idea told the board he thought Chandler should become vacant or be torn down “rather than depreciate a large and substantial neighborhood." The mostly white crowd booed African-American civil rights lawyer Oliver W. Hill, who said he also opposed turning Chandler into what he termed a “Jim Crow school,” citing the Supreme Court’s decision that segregated schools are inherently unequal. He encouraged white residents to remain in the neighborhood "and let Negro children come into the schools as a matter of natural course."
Ultimately, the School Board chose not to remove Chandler’s white students, and on Aug. 15, 1960, the State Pupil Placement Board assigned Carol Swann and Gloria Mead to the school while rejecting two other applicants, reasoning that they lived closer to the overcrowded, all-black Benjamin Graves Junior High School.
Photo from the Anderson Collection courtesy The Valentine
Swann-Daniels recalls that on the first day of school, the two girls were told to arrive after all the other students were inside. As they walked toward the school, she says, “all the photographers were at the other end of the street, so they started running toward us. That was really terrifying. You felt like you were going to be trampled by a marauding herd of buffalo.”
Carol’s father and Gloria’s mother stopped at the corner, and the girls walked the rest of the way by themselves. As she ascended the steps, Swann-Daniels felt the weight of responsibility.
“There was a lot of pressure on us from our community to show that black people were smart,” she says. “People that I didn’t know would come up to you and say, ‘We’re counting on you. You’ve got to show them.’ "
She was also thinking of the advice she’d received from Principal Madden and others beforehand: If other students bother you, ignore them and they will get bored and stop. “Everyone seemed to think it would last a couple of weeks at most and then the kids would move on to something else,” she says. “They didn’t.”
The white students who weren't openly hostile were mostly indifferent, she says.
“I remember that students had some kind of fear of sitting on a seat that you might have sat on, or accidentally brushing against you, because they would become contaminated. In the auditorium, you’d have empty seats all around you, so you’d have a circle of empty seats and it kind of highlighted your isolation.”
The next year, at the new John Marshall High School on Old Brook Road, it was more of the same. That year, another black student joined the ninth-grade class: Brenda Williams Jones. She and Carol and Gloria shared rides to school.
Brenda Williams Jones today (Photo courtesy Brenda Williams Jones)
"It was a challenging experience," recalls Jones, a Chesterfield County resident who has done mission work in Mexico after retiring from teaching in Fairfax County Public Schools. "We always felt we had to be vigilant. It was like [we were] three green apples in a bunch of red ones. Things would happen in the hall, so we kind of all stuck together to make sure we could be protective of each other. I was always a little nervous. I never traveled the halls by myself."
Sometimes, Swann-Daniels says, "Football players would trip you in the hallways, and then you’d drop your books and when you’re picking them up, they’d say, 'Look at the maid scrubbing the floor.' They made paper airplanes and put pins in the end of them so if they flew around and hit you, then these pins would stick in you."
She and Jones recall one white student who did befriend them: the late Vaughn Elizabeth Bolton, whose parents were missionaries with what was then the Southern Presbyterian Church. When the family was in Richmond on furlough from Africa, Vaughn would sit with them at lunch. She even invited Carol over to spend the night once.
Carol Swann-Daniels today (Photo by Heather Lyne/Embrace Richmond)
"Lunch was horrible, because they would throw things like half-filled milk cartons that, when they hit you, they’d splash all over you. So after lunch you would be really covered with food. And the years that Vaughn was there, she ate lunch with us, so she kind of suffered the same thing. ... So she really, I guess, took a big step in terms of putting herself out there for ridicule that other students weren’t willing to do."
Teachers and administrators weren't particularly supportive, Swann-Daniels says. One of her high school history teachers told the class that Abraham Lincoln did enslaved people a disservice by freeing them.
"When I applied to colleges, [the guidance counselor] wrote unsolicited letters in which she referred to me as 'it,' " Swann-Daniels says. "I would not have known that except that I went on a college interview and the interviewer showed me the letter, and the interviewer was so horrified that in a perverse way, I think that was a positive thing. It verified things I wrote in my essay, that they were true."
Carmen Foster, an education consultant and historian, researched the early days of school integration for her doctoral dissertation at the University of Virginia: “Tension, Resistance and Transition: School Desegregation in Richmond’s North Side, 1960-63.” She says it's important to keep in mind what was happening in the community at the time.
“I prefer to look at the children who desegregated the school system as sacrificial lambs holding up the banner for the race during the civil rights movement," she says. "I think that one misses the point if they just look at the girls walking up the steps. It was an important photo op. But it leaves out a lot of the tension and transition that Richmond had to contend with during 1960.“
Foster says it's also significant that only four children initially applied to attend Chandler.
"Oliver Hill had expected hundreds because the conditions at Benjamin Graves Junior High School were such that the school was hugely under-resourced, overpopulated, and, despite pleas that parents would make at School Board meetings, the white City Council was not budging."
Among those who did apply, she says, "there was this hopefulness that your child would be getting access to more resources that white schools had that black schools didn’t. Access to more microscopes. Access to more chemistry [equipment]. So they were willing to take the chance."
But they gave up a nurturing environment and social interaction. At segregated schools, Foster says, “the black teachers that were there, like the teachers before them and the teachers before them, were committed to uplifting the race." The schools were also interconnected with families, churches and neighborhoods, she adds.
Jones says that at John Marshall, she was never part of the social life at the school. She wanted to be a cheerleader, she says, adding, "I tried out, but you know they were not going to integrate the cheering squad."
From left: Brenda Williams, Gloria Mead and Carol Swann and Williams and schoolmate Lisa Thompson appear in clippings from the Richmond Afro American in the 1960s. (Images courtesy Brenda Williams Jones)
Robert Mead, who attended the school several years after his sister Gloria, says he never had a conversation with a white student outside the context of a classroom until he went to college at the University of Chicago.
"I had to overcome a lot of negative messages growing up in the segregated South," he says. "I had to overcome a lot of self-doubt and questions about my self-worth."
Swann-Daniels went to Colby College in Maine, intentionally choosing a school as far from Richmond as her parents would allow her to go, she says.
Gloria Mead Jinadu also chose a Northern school, Shimer College near Chicago. There, Patricia Mead says, "She had a very different experience in terms of relationships with whites. She had very good friends. Some of them came home with her on breaks."
She spent her junior year as a foreign exchange student at Oxford University in England, where she met her husband, Adele Jinadu, and later moved to his native Nigeria with him, though she returned to Richmond to complete graduate programs in social work at Virginia Commonwealth University. In Nigeria, Gloria taught at the University of Lagos. She died in 1997 at age 50.
Jones took a different path after high school, attending the historically black Tennessee State University in Nashville. There, she says, "I didn’t feel that I was always on guard. I blended. ... At Tennessee State, you didn’t have to worry about who you sit next to or what to wear. When I went to Tennessee State, it was a relief."
Looking back at the experience of school integration now, was it worth it?
"If I had to do it again, I would, because later on it helped me to be able to work in integrated situations and not feel intimidated," Jones says.
But she's troubled by the state of schools today in places such as Richmond, where white and middle-class families largely abandoned public schools in the wake of desegregation and busing. At John Marshall High School today, for example, black students make up 92 percent of the student body, while just 6 percent are white, and 78 percent of the students are considered economically disadvantaged, according to the Virginia Department of Education.
"A lot of African-Americans say it would have been better if we stayed in our own schools," Jones says. "As hard as we fought for integration, was it the best thing for us? I have not even been able to wrap my mind around what happened. I think we began to separate along socioeconomic lines as well as racial."
While teaching in Fairfax County, she tried to address the racial and economic disparities through a nonprofit she founded called the Black Diamond Foundation, which offered disadvantaged children the opportunity the visit cultural sites in Washington.
"I feel very discouraged," Swann-Daniels says. "We really pushed and pushed to get that rock up the hill, and now it’s going backwards."
Asked during a phone interview how she perceives the legacy of school integration, Patricia Mead returns the question: What do you think?
Well, I say, it would be nice if all these sacrifices the students and families made had led to something better.
"Not yet," she says.
Then Mead tells me that her mother, Florence Murray Mead, was raised by Patricia's great-grandmother, Julia Mae Murray, who was born in 1856 in Lincolnton, Georgia, before emancipation. Put that way, the stretch of time from the era of slavery until now seems short.
"Social change takes time," she says. "Generations."
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