NSU School Series
Norfolk State University Through The Years:
“Behold the Green and Gold”
By Gary Ruegsegger
Special To The New Journal and Guide
Standing on the Norfolk State campus, you can almost hear A. B. Jackson whispering in the breeze, “Wow, did you see that?”
The renowned painter often expressed his sense of wonder and amazement with that simple catch phrase. Jackson explained, “Seeing is my religion.”
Original NSU campus
Well, if he could see today’s Norfolk State, the artist might have trouble believing his eyes.
These days there’s nothing little about “Little State.”
But Jackson, fresh from his studies at Yale, first tread the college’s landscape in the mid-fifties. He taught a full class load and was the art advisor on the school’s first yearbook.
Just a few years before, the campus was Norfolk’s Memorial Park Golf Course.
Jackson left Norfolk State in 1967 for a faculty position at Old Dominion. He was ODU’s first African American professor.
By the way, Jackson’s paintings now hang in the White House, Dartmouth College, Chrysler Museum and scores of other galleries & museums.
Seeing is believing.
Four Jackson watercolors, gifts from the artist, look down from the dining room walls of Celestyne Diggs Porter’s Virginia Beach home.
She and Jackson were colleagues at Norfolk State and Old Dominion. Shortly before his death in 1981, Jackson personally framed and hung paintings. He was only 55.
Mrs. Porter “knows the story” of Norfolk State as well as anyone. She was the school’s first drama advisor and an adjunct professor for decades. Her uncle J. Eugene Diggs and her aunt Bertha B. Jones were members of the “Founders Group.”
Through the years, she carefully watched as the university grew from its cramped quarters in the Hunton YMCA on Brambleton Avenue to today’s spacious Park Avenue campus. In the forties and fifties, she taught at its Bank Street facilities and old St. Vincent de Paul Hospital plant.
The school’s legends have all called her “friend”—Samuel Fischer Scott, Dr. Lyman Beecher Brooks, Dick Price, Dr. Harrison B. Wilson, Joe Echols, G. W. C. Brown and so many others.
“My, my, my, it has been something to see. At 96, these old brown eyes have seen a lot of dreams come true. I don’t know if my old friend Professor Jackson would recognize the place today,” she said.
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