Page 6 - Demo

September 5, 1962. One of the three black students who entered white Perrymont Elementary School under the grade-a-year integration plan.
“no matAter how long” The Struggle to Integrate the Public Schools in Lynchburg, 1954–1970
10 LYNCH’S FERRY
lthough the city’s schools were desegregated in the winter of 1962, they were not completely integrated. In fact, they would not be fully integrated until the fall of 1970, sixteen years after the Supreme Court ruled that race- based segregation violated the Constitution. In 1961, the Freedom Riders made the city one of their stops on the
way farther south and Martin Luther King visited Lynchburg in 1962
as part of a Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) lecture tour. With such diverse and nationally prominent Civil Rights activity
in Lynchburg, why did it take an additional eight years to satisfy the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown in 1954? First, the politically powerful in Lynchburg’s white community delayed as long as possible to prevent such an occurrence in the city’s school system. And second, the dogged determination of a black principal and his supporters held the vocal and socially progressive black community in check for a number of years.
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