Part 2: Behold the Green and Gold

The Dream and The Dreamers

By Gary Ruegsegger
Special to The New Journal and Guide

     From the marble steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words captivated the world on Aug. 28, 1963.
  “Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream,” he said.  “It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.”
    Somewhere among the crowd of thousands stood Mal Nicholson of the Journal and Guide.  The Morgan State graduate was the only local newspaperman to cover the historic march. 
    But Nicholson already knew about the dream.  He learned about it in his Lamberts Point home and at J. J. Smallwood Elementary School.  His teachers—Miss Mary E. Brown, Miss Clara M. Boyd and Mrs. Lydia G. Hall—had learned about the dream from their parents.

The Booker T. Class of 1938 at their 69th Reunion in summer, 2007

   “Our teachers made the difference.  They sacrificed because they wanted us to strive to be the best we could be,” he said.

    His teachers knew that education was a crucial milepost on the road to equality.
Nicholson kept his and his teachers’ dream alive later with his work at Norfolk State University.  In 1979, he was named Assistant Vice President for Development.  Nicholson retired as the Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs.

    Many others standing on the Washington Mall also knew about the dream.  It was a dream handed down from generation to generation.  Their grandparents told their parents and their parents told them.
Thirty years before Dr. King’s words rolled like thunder across the Washington landscape, the Norfolk State Founders Group shared that same dream with each other.
     Twenty years before the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the leaders of Norfolk and Portsmouth’s Black communities shared their dream with the world. 
      It was a bold dream, but the dreamers were a bold group.
    Certainly Booker T. principal Winston Douglas was a giant, but standing equally tall was George William Clement Brown Sr.
     The 1960 Spartan, the school’s first yearbook, said of G. W. C. Brown:  “Dr. Brown, whose breadth of vision, enthusiastic support, sympathetic understanding, adherence to lofty ideals and principles, and sense of justice always tempered with mercy has served as an example and an inspiration to the College and the community.”
     “G. W. C. Brown was a nuts and bolts kind of guy.  Good intentions are not enough.  You have to be willing to do the work to make those intentions a reality,” said one admirer.
     And there is no shortage of G. W. C. Brown admirers in Hampton Roads.
     In his book “Upward: The History of Norfolk State University,” Dr. Lyman B. Brooks said, “He was an independent thinker who expressed his ideas freely and contended for them strongly.”
  ber of the Founders Group, Harvey N. Johnson Sr.

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