A separate piece

By CAITLIN SULLIVAN/Staff

When Jerry Jones moved back to his hometown in 2001, his students at Emory & Henry College assumed he attended the district high school just down the road.
“A lot of people don’t know how things were back in those days and I think it needs to be known,” he said. “I’m not a writer but I experienced so much of it so by default I’m the one to write it.”
What he’s talking about is segregation and the book he’s writing about it.
You see, black students in Washington County were bused to the segregated Douglas High School in Bristol. That means Jones didn’t attend Patrick Henry, just a few miles from his house. It took 11 years for Washington County to uphold the 1954 Brown vs. the Board of Education decision to integrate schools.
One afternoon in the spring of 1965, E.B. Stanley, then the superintendent of county schools, boarded the all-black bus in Bristol, Va., and told the Douglas High kids that “new” federal guidelines prevented the county from sending them to Douglas. In the fall, Stanley told the group, all students would attend the school closest to their homes.
Jones said, “I kind of knew what it meant.”
One thing it meant was that students like Jones wouldn’t be boarding the bus at 7:30 a.m. to travel the more than hour ride for an education.
“Brown vs. the Board of Education was in 1954 and still in 1965 I was going to a segregated school,” he said. “It was confusing to me.”
Jones wonders how long he and other black students would have been stuck down in Douglas if the federal government hadn’t gotten involved.
“Money does talk, or the lack thereof,” he said.
Jones was born and raised in the same house his mother and grandmother were raised in. His great-grandfather, a freed slave from Wythe County, Crockett Johnston and his wife, Mary Johnston, built the house in Glade Spring in 1870. His mother, Mary Waugh Jones, worked in many of Glade Spring’s prominent white families’ homes, including in Robert Porterfield’s for 20 years. She had finished the seventh grade in the 1920’s. There was no school for black students in Washington County. A lot of people moved away, Jones said, chasing a better education, better jobs and a better life. His uncle followed a path that ended in New Jersey, where he became a cardiologist. He never returned.
“Some people would not have wanted to go to a black doctor here,” Jones said.
The exodus changed the racial makeup of the county.
“The black population has dwindled significantly,” he said. “In my mother’s day it was very vibrant.”
Even though the racism was more institutionalized with separate schools – before Douglas, Jones attended the Glade Spring “Colored” Elementary School – separate waiting rooms at the Greyhound bus station in Bristol and separate entrances to restaurants, Jones said there were many black-owned businesses in Glade Spring. There was his grandfather Wiley Waugh’s barbershop in Town Square and Okie Skipper Stuart’s restaurant. His grandfather cut white hair and the restaurant served white customers, but through a separate entrance.
“This neighborhood was integrated,” he said. “We played together, we just didn’t go to school together…. I never could understand why we had to sit in the front of the train and the back of the bus.”
Jones said he never thought much about the racism growing up. It was just there, evident in even the little things, like when Miss Okie reopened the restaurant in 1960. She removed the partition that segregated the races and Jones said “you didn’t see many white folks in there anymore.”
Jones said he accepted the way things were while growing up. The Thursday night football games. Friday nights were for the whites. The segregated Dixie Theater in Glade Spring. Black people watching movies from the balcony while white people sat down below. And he accepted the double-standard, the one that said whites could come up to the balcony but blacks couldn’t go down to the white section.
Integration was gradual, he said, but a few memories stand out as watershed moments.
In 1965, Jones was a guest disc jockey on a Bristol radio station, playing James Brown, Aretha Franklin and little Stevie Wonder. One Saturday after his program, Jones walked from Valley Drive up to Lee Highway to catch the Fuller bus. As a kid he’d had to sit in the back from Glade to Bristol.
“I remember sitting on the very front seat,” Jones said. “Later that same year when I went off to college on the train I sat anywhere I wanted.”
In the summer of 1964 Jones and another black girl integrated Emory & Henry College’s summer Math Institute sponsored by the National Science Foundation. It was the first time he shared a room with a white person, he said, and probably the first time a black student stayed in the dorms at Emory & Henry.
Jones said he had an opportunity to be in the Emory & Henry class that started in the fall of 1965 but declined because he didn’t want the pressure of going from being part of a majority in high school to an extreme minority in college.
“I felt like being a freshman would be stressful enough,” he said. “I wanted to do (integrate) gradually instead of all at one time… I don’t think of myself as a pioneer.”
So Jones went to the all-black Virginia State College in Petersburg where he studied business education.
Even then, things moved slow. In 1969, he applied to be a teacher in Washington County. Never hearing a response, he stopped by the school board office to ask about the application.
Superintendent “E.B. Stanley said ‘we didn’t think you’d be interested because you have a bachelor’s degree,’” he said. “I didn’t understand that.”
Jones ended up teaching in Baltimore and then in Richmond for 27 years.
In 1973, he received his master’s degree and in 2001 returned to Glade Spring to take care of his ailing mother. Once home, he began teaching computer literacy at Emory & Henry College.
The church was even slower to integrate than the schools, Jones said. The Methodists didn’t officially integrate until 1968. Ebenezer United Methodist Church, Jones’ home church, didn’t get its first white minister until 1998.
“If you walked through Glade Spring in the 1970s and 80s and went into the churches you could have said not much had changed since the 1940s,” he said.
Other things, though, moved more swiftly.
“I was the fifth black person to serve on town council and that speaks well for Glade Spring,” he said. “There are other boards and town councils (in the county) who have yet to have a black person (serve).”
Jones has written five chapters of his book chronicling his childhood during segregation. He’s conducted interviews with people, such as teacher and bus driver Georgia Polk of Glade Spring, and teacher Harriet Debose of Abingdon. His working title is ‘Go and Come Again.’ It was a saying of his mother’s, one he finds pertinent for the many black people who had to leave the area to find education and jobs, including himself. Jones left Glade Spring, got educated, worked and returned home to work full-time at a once segregated college.
“I feel like it needs to be done,” he said. “People aren’t aware that schools were segregated and that there are still people alive who experienced segregation in schools and accommodations.”
He plans to publish the book next year.
To contact Caitlin Sullivan e-mail csullivan@wythenews.com or call (276) 628-7101.