Preface to
My Biography of
James Solomon Russell
On June 14, 1962, a Thursday night, I graduated from
Norview High School in Norfolk, Virginia. It was, of course, a happy event. But
it was also an historical event. When I was about to enter my high school
freshman class in 1958 the Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia closed all
of the State’s schools that were ordered by the Federal Government to be
racially integrated. That was the period of Virginia’s “Massive Resistance.”
With our public school doors chained – not just Norview but Granby and Maury
high schools – the white community set up schools around the city. In my
neighborhood three churches allowed the use of their buildings for temporary
schools. In the Five Points section of the Norview community there were three
large churches: Norview Presbyterian Church; Norview Baptist Church; and
Norview Methodist Church. All of these churches became temporary schools in the
fall of 1958. Not all of the students attended these church schools. Some moved
away to live with family members in the western part of Virginia which was not
affected by the closures. Many went out of State. But I settled into my new
high school, Norview Methodist Church.
Many of our regular high school teachers taught in those temporary
church schools as if the high school had opened. So we didn’t miss a beat,
academically. The Norview High School Band still rehearsed in the afternoons
for football games, and the football team practiced each week for their
upcoming games. And despite the interruptions, the Norview HS football team
became the best team in the State of Virginia over the four years until
graduation in 1962.
My class studies in the church school were the same as if
I had entered the official high school. The “colored” students who were
selected by the School Board to attend the previously all-white schools were
tutored at the First Baptist Church on Bute Street in downtown Norfolk. We all
waited on the outcome of the huge political battle between the Governor of
Virginia and the United States Department of Justice. Eventually Virginia
complied with the Federal court order and the city’s schools opened in January,
1959. That first day – that first day of integration – presented itself as a
mass of humanity converging on almost every square foot of Norview’s campus. Of
the seventeen colored students selected, seven were assigned to Norview.
I lived on Sewells Point Road directly across from the
high school. Never did I have to ride buses to schools during my twelve years
of public schooling – I walked. But the colored students near our neighborhood,
who, ironically, lived behind the high school in a section named Oakwood, had
to ride school system-chartered commercial buses across town to attend Booker
T. Washington High School or Ruffner Junior High. Those buses passed by my
house every school morning and afternoon. But on the day of reckoning – in
January 1959 – seven African American students entered Norview High School, and
so did I. One of the new students was most memorable to me, Andrew Heidelberg.
My personal history with colored people was not all that new to me, but
attending school with them was simply expected to be different, and I didn’t
know what to make of it. I remember Andrew fairly well because the two of us
were in many classes together and in our senior year we were in the same
homeroom. He was athletic, but that is not the attribute I remember most. He
had personality and was not shy. Or so it seemed. He was certainly assertive in
spirit but allowed himself no aggressiveness, which, according to our
expectations, would have been natural for a Negro in a strange place, or so I
thought at the time. It was only later in life that I learned that Andrew was
mortified at attending the previously all-white school; he was scared to death.
From my point of view, he was successful in his high school career despite the
many obstacles placed before him. He and the other African American students
had to have been brave. I know, because I recall hearing ferocious verbal
attacks thrown at them. But Andrew appeared to brush them off. Such was the
image I have held for all these years in the back of my mind. Why do I write
about this experience now in 2012?
In the spring of 1965 or 1966, I cannot remember
precisely, while stationed at Marine Corps Schools in Quantico, Virginia, I
thought I saw Andrew. A regional college sporting event was taking place at the
base. I was a military musician returning, in formation, to my barracks from
the opening ceremonies at the football field. Out of the corner of my eye I
thought I saw Andrew, so I cocked my head slightly to the left and looked
directly. It was Andrew. So I yelled
“Heidelberg” as loud as I could. He looked up to find who bellowed his name,
but with seventy military musicians in uniform marching past him it would have
been difficult to pick out a single voice. And after the band was dismissed I
walked to the athletic field to find him. I never did. For more than forty
years afterward I forgot about Massive Resistance and all that went on during
my high school days. As I began studying James Solomon Russell, and through the
rigors of that process of research and learning, my youthful and adult
experiences with matters racial returned to my mind. One day last year I
connected with friends (from high school days) on one of the Internet-based
social media websites, some of whom were connected with Andrew Heidelberg.
Well, you know what I had to do. I made the connection with Andrew and we
exchanged several Internet-based chats. Although he recalled that particular
Quantico sporting event, he did not remember my yell. This, however, was
sufficient verification for me.
Andrew told me that he had written a book[1]
about his experiences from1958 to1962. Naturally, his experiences were totally
different from mine. There was so much that I did not know; so much that
escaped my attention; so much activity that I thought would never have
happened. It was an awakening for me. For those days in the late 50s and early
60s were dark for many. Hopefully Andrew
and I will meet again before our times come to an end. In the meantime, I
struggle with my own thoughts. My high school experience was one factor in my
research on James Solomon Russell.
Although mostly unknown, James Solomon Russell was a key
person in the post-Reconstruction educational movement with former slaves in
Virginia. Russell was a double-sided entrepreneur: his educational venture
produced what is now St. Paul’s College in Lawrenceville, Virginia; and in his
spiritual and religious life he was at the center of developing the largest
convocation of African American churches in the Episcopal Church. Why study
Russell?
Russell’s life was, seemingly, lived mostly “under the
radar” as we would say in the twenty-first century. Although he wrote his Autobiography,[2]
other people wrote three academic theses (one Ph.D. dissertation and two
masters’ theses) about either Russell himself or the St. Paul School. Several
articles have been written about the man and his work. Russell is remembered
mostly in a small quarter of the African American community, the Episcopal
Church, and the Southside, Virginia region. Why was Russell important to me,
important enough to write about?
In the year 2000 I began my serious investigation of
Russell. There were two reasons motivating my research. The initial reason, and
at the time the only reason, that I began my study was due to my mother. During
my childhood she would talk about Dr. Russell, off and on. But her talk was
frequent enough and consistent in its content over the years that it must have
made an indelible impression in the back of my mind. My mother was born and
reared in Lawrenceville, Virginia and to her Lawrenceville was idyllic and the
perfect place to grow up. She did not stay there for long after her high school
graduation and eventually moved to Norfolk where I was born in 1944. For
eighteen years of my life mother would talk of Lawrenceville and Russell and,
of course, we traveled the short ninety miles to visit family over the years.
So, when I began my investigation of Russell it was a project taken up in my
own old age. My initial output was a Master of Sacred Theology from the School
of Theology at Sewanee, the University of the South. I was awarded that degree
at age sixty-six, and I knew that I could not stop with just the thesis; I had
to study more because something happened to me during the project.
As I wrote above, my mother provided the initial
motivation for my study of Dr. Russell. But it was my engagement with that
study that brought to light my second motivation – my high school experience
and its attending race problem. Why do we have race problems in the United
States? In 2011, 150 years following the start of the American Civil War, our
nation is recalling those years when we were divided. Did the North and the
South really reconcile? Have we as a nation learned anything over these years?
Am I learning anything which might shed light on our continuing national
predicament? It came to me that if I could attempt to fix James Solomon Russell
within the context of his circumstances, his history, then perhaps I could
identify the parameters of my own experience. Little things that my mother told
me about Lawrenceville and Russell have stayed with me. For example, Russell
was really white in complexion, but he lived as a black man. He was the nicest
man in town. My mother and one of her sisters were telephone operators. In
those days there were no push-button or rotary-dial telephones. The caller had
to speak with a telephone company operator in order to place a call. On more
than one occasion, my mother and her sister Willie would tell stories about
directing calls to the “Archdeacon.” (Many if not most of the Lawrenceville
locals referred to Russell as the Archdeacon.) Almost without fail the
Archdeacon, after finishing his telephone conversation, would reconnect with
the dispatching operator (my mother or one of my aunts) to thank them for
placing the earlier, usually long-distance, connection. My grandfather,
Fredrick Lewis Jones, owned and operated the grocery store in Lawrenceville. He
conducted business with the St. Paul School and Dr. Russell. My grandfather
died in 1952 and whenever we visited him he always had a nice story to tell
about the Archdeacon.
Russell’s Autobiography
is just one resource that I have studied to understand his life. His addresses,
sermons, and work logs also provide clues to his approach to living. He cites
in his four situations where he is mistaken for a white man, yet he pleads no
interest in nor has available time for ancestor worship or genealogy search. He
was a man about tasks and projects, both secular and ecclesiastical. He was
often presented with many vexing situations during his lifetime, many
situations filled with manifestations of racism. He successfully dealt with
black and white alike. He argued with and challenged both. Of concern in this
book is Russell’s statement that the mass exodus for former slaves from the
Episcopal Church was a mistake. Though understandable, why did Russell deem it
a mistake? He exhibited the patience of Job in some of his judgments which may
have led some to call him an “accomodationist,” a term some would link with
“compromised” as it was applied to Booker T. Washington. But how Russell
handled his situations is instructive.
James Solomon Russell certainly was a pioneer in
post-Reconstruction education for former slaves and their families, and he was
a principled leader in the reconstruction or reordering of ecclesiastical
attitudes of racism played out in canonical manipulations and justifications.
The simple fact that Russell was born and reared in Virginia is also
significant. Virginia, the colony and then the state that produced Washington,
Jefferson, and Madison, generated the new American republic and its ideas of
freedom. Virginia also produced Booker T. Washington, Robert Russa Moton, and
James Solomon Russell. How Virginia as a State worked through its racial
situations, and how the Episcopal Church in Virginia did the same, formed
Russell. He lived his entire life as a Christian evangelical. In this book I
attempt to situate Russell in the history he inherited and in the milieu he
experienced. How I present the Archdeacon to the reader necessarily filters
through my own life experience. I remain faithful to the facts found in
Russell’s writings and in third party documentation, but in no way can I avoid
interpreting his life. He was a man who understood who he was, accepted what
life gave him, and made something of it.
Worth E. Norman, Jr.
January 31, 2012
Birmingham, AL
Link to my biography of James Solomon Russell
[1]
Heidelberg, Andrew I. The Norfolk 17: A
Personal Narrative on Desegregation in Norfolk, Virginia in 1958 – 1962. Pittsburgh:
Rose Dog Press, 2006.
[2]
The single word Autobiography, in
italics, is used in this book as a substitute label for the book Adventure in Faith: An Autobiographic Story
of St. Paul Normal and Industrial School, Lawrenceville, Virginia. New
York: Morehouse Publishing, 1936.
