For the better part of an hour, they had sat and listened to Patricia Godbolt White speak. She talked of rising above persecution, the successes achieved throughout her educational career and the pride she had in her family, raised here in Hampton Roads.
But still one young man in the audience could not get past part of her story.
“Why did they throw the knife at you?” his voice asked timidly.
“Because they were just mean,” he was assured.
“There wasn’t a reason for it,” he stammered back.
“No…no.”
White was one of the Norfolk 17, the first black students after desegregation in 1959 to attend previously all white Norfolk schools. In honor of the 60th anniversary of the groundbreaking Brown vs. Board of Education decision, Virginia Beach Middle School (VBMS) administration wanted students to get a real perspective on the impact desegregation had on the people who lived through it.
Luckily, they did not need to go far.
VBMS Guidance Director Lavell White is Patricia’s son. He arranged for his mother to speak to classes about her experiences as a young high school student bravely taking on a world of hate and bigotry by just walking through her school’s doors each day.
Her stories kept the middle-schooler-filled schola spellbound.
She talked of the English teacher who flunked her paper because she had capitalized one word incorrectly. That same English teacher refused her admittance to the National Honor Society because, he told her, membership was brought before a student vote, and the students did not want her in.
Years later, as an NHS advisor herself, she would learn students never voted on membership.
She also spoke of a normal morning, walking to the school’s entrance. Suddenly, she heard a sound at her feet. She looked down and saw a knife had been flung at her. She just kept walking.
The world around her was talking of the “massive resistance” to integration. For Patricia, and her 16 colleagues, they were doing their best to take part in “passive resistance” to the prejudice they were subjected to.
“We acted as if nothing was happening,” she said. Later, during a question and answer session, she expounded on this idea when a student asked what to do when a bully gets you down.
“They can bring you down only if you let them,” she said. “If you ignore them, they get no gratification from that.”
Though that did not mean there was not fear.
In one of the most chilling moments of her presentation, Patricia revealed how she desperately prayed for rain on her graduation day. Graduations at that time were held outside in the school’s football field, which meant they were open to the public.
“I was afraid, very afraid,” Patricia said. “I was afraid somebody was going to shoot me.”
It did not rain that day, and Patricia graduated – incident free – as the first African American from a desegregated school in the state of Virginia.
Her accolades did not stop there. She attended Washington College and was the first African-American female to graduate from its campus. Attending college also afforded her the opportunity to build friendships that would soothe the wounds left from her high school years.
Case in point, one night a group of girls in the dorm invited Patricia to come to the movie theater with them to catch a show. Though hesitant, Patricia went along. Once there, the theater manager told Patricia she would have to sit in the balcony of the theater – away from all the other white guests. She walked up the stairs alone and took a seat by herself in the balcony.
It wasn’t lonely for long.
“I hear all this noise and there were all my friends from Washington College coming to sit with me,” she said.
Patricia told the students her four years in college “took the bitter taste” out of her mouth from the years of mistreatment she had received. In fact, Patricia was able to put aside the years of hardship as a teenager and she returned to Norfolk Public Schools, this time as a teacher. She went on to teach in the school system for 42 years.
And, with the skill and passionate delivery of a teacher with four decades of classroom experience, Patricia left VBMS’s students with a simple challenge.
“Become authors,” she said. “Become artists. Become great if you are not already that.”
Certainly a legacy of hope for all educators!