Champions of desegregation take pride in witnessing swearing-in

From 1885 until 1926, the one-room Lucasville School House in Manassas housed black elementary students.

Today, the restored building sits down the street from modern homes on Godwin Drive. Between its architecture, its size and its proximity to the rest of the neighborhood, Lucasville now seems out of place. It stands alone, a remnant of a time when separate did not mean equal when it came to race.

Fannie Fitzgerald, Maxine Coleman, Zella Brown and the late Mary Glaze Porter never taught at Lucasville, yet they knew what it meant to be isolated from the white community, just like the school and the houses that surround it.

The women who would integrate Prince William County Public Schools in 1964 grew up in a Virginia when their parents couldn’t vote and public facilities open to whites were strictly off limits.

Fast forward to today and these women are living the dream that Martin Luther King spoke so eloquently about. A day after honoring the famous civil rights activist, they will celebrate the inauguration of the first black president in the history of the United States.

“Sometimes it just hard to describe,” Brown, 73, said of Barack Obama being elected president. “It’s just a feeling. I just get a certain feeling that I can’t put into words. It’s just powerful. I am really overwhelmed.”

“I had to pinch myself, [had to tell myself] this is for real,” Coleman said. “It’s just a wonderful experience.”

That sentiment has been publicly shared by many other black residents of Prince William County. But Obama’s historic rise from a junior senator from Illinois to president captivated not just the black community, but most of the nation.

And there is a connection between these women and Obama that spans generations. Coleman, Brown, Porter and Fitzgerald became bridges to a new world — one that was starting to shed its racist image of the 1960s. While some of them were hand-picked, white children at the respective schools where they taught embraced these new authority figures wholeheartedly.

“They [white children] acted just like the black ones,” laughed Coleman, 89, who went from Antioch McCrae to Loch Lomond Elementary School in Manassas. “I saw no difference. ...When I would put my stern face on, they all looked the same.”

Today, blacks and whites sit together in the classroom. And the future for blacks appears boundless, now that the color barrier has been broken at the highest level. 

From teaching in a little white house 100 years ago to running the White House, blacks have come a long way.

“We always told [our kids] that they could be anything they wanted to be and now they really can see that they can be anything they want to be,” said Gwen Porter Washington, Mary Porter’s daughter.

Washington, who attended Jennie Dean High School in Manassas 50 years ago, said her mother would be ecstatic if she were living today. Yet the color of people’s skin was always secondary with her and her father.

J. Wilmer Porter became the first publicly elected black official in Virginia since Reconstruction when he was voted onto the Dumfries Town Council. He was also a successful businessman whose clientele was predominantly white.

“I think the biggest thing with him [Obama] is I believe that he cares, and that’s what got him elected,” Washington said. “No matter what color their skin was, they believed that he cared.”

Washington and her family will be celebrating inauguration day at a friend’s house along with sister Hazel Porter Sykes. Fitzgerald plans to attend a Presidential Inaugural Gala put on by the the Virginia NAACP Area 13 Branch while Coleman and Brown will be glued to the television set.

When the party’s over, these women hope that he will be able to affect change like he’s preached throughout his campaign. Washington hopes that Americans will continue to look at Obama’s character instead of his skin color.

“I don’t expect him to completely reverse everything that’s wrong, but I think the caring he has for people, we will accept [his presidency] better,” Washington said.

With any luck, Americans will accept him just like the students accepted these outstanding teachers more than 40 years ago.

“Children are children, it doesn’t matter the color of their skin,” Fitzgerald said. “After that first day, I realized that.”

Staff writer Kipp Hanley can be reached at 703-878-8062.