NSU School Series

Part Four:

Fishermen, Dreamers And Leaders
 

By Gary Ruegsegger
Special To The New Journal and Guide 
 
      Winston Douglas never missed a chance to “drop a line and wet a hook.”  He was an avid fisherman.
      “We always caught more than we could eat.  Our friends and neighbors always had plenty of fish,” recalled his son Dr. Cromwell Douglas.
     That was just one of the joys of knowing the former Booker T. principal.
      In 1932, when Douglas started fishing for a college, the Black students of Hampton Roads would catch the sea.  It would eventually swell to the ocean that is Norfolk State University today. 
     The outlaw Butch Cassidy liked to say, “I’ve got vision and the rest of the world is wearing bifocals.” Although too modest to say it about himself, the same can be said about Douglas.
     Look at the times.  It was the middle of the Great Depression.  Jim Crow was everywhere.
     “When my Uncle Jack won that case that gave City Beach to the Coloreds—that’s what they called us back then—the Ku Klux Klan burned a fiery cross on our lawn in Boulevard Terrace,” recalled the 96-year-old Celestyne Diggs Porter.  “Uncle Jack said, ‘Do not tell a child or anyone what happened here tonight.’”
      And Douglas was asking for a college.  He had to be dreaming.
      Norfolk’s schools were segregated.  So were the hotels, movie theaters and lunch counters.  Lafayette Park had white and Black restrooms, white and Black water fountains.
      Heck, until 1953, Blacks could only watch a ballgame from High Rock Park’s “Colored Grandstand.”
      Norfolk’s Black teachers taught more students for less pay.  The salary scale would not be equalized until Aline Black Hicks and Melvin Alston finally said, “Enough is enough!”

        But enough was never enough and equal was always less!
     Norfolk’s Black students always got the hand-me-down buildings and the second-hand books.
     “Books stayed on the textbook lists for five years. Sirelda James and I were looking at some geometry textbooks that were going off the list—and we’d never seen the books before,” recalled Booker T. mathematics instructor Mrs. Johnnie Q. Branch.
      And that was a decade after Winston Douglas asked for a college for African American students.
      A decade before Douglas’ request, Norfolk built three new schools—Booker T. Washington High School, James Blair Jr. High School and William H. Ruffner Jr. High School.
     The two large junior highs fed into the all-white Maury High School.  Both schools had large gyms and spacious cafeterias.
     Douglas’ Booker T. Washington High School had no gym or cafeteria.  The new Black high school served as its own feeder school also housing Booker T. Washington Intermediate School. 
     Thirty years after its construction and two years before Brown v. Board of Education, Norfolk gave the aging Ruffner Jr. High School to its African American community.  They left the 30-year old desks and the worn out textbooks.
     On the other side of the water, Portsmouth’s I. C. Norcom High School also housed the lower grades.  Its teachers and principal, William E. Riddick, also worked for lower pay.
     And the books and the buildings in Portsmouth were just as old and worn out as the ones in Norfolk.
     Yet Douglas wrote his letters and somehow an urban university was born. He had to be a dreamer.

To read other stories, subscribe to the New Journal and Guide.