Dateline ’67: NY Times On The First Black Prep Schoolers In The South

As part of our year-long look at the year 1967 — a time of immense social change, including the fall of the Ivy League Look — we present this lengthy New York Times Magazine feature from last week. The story recounts the first African American boys to integrate the South’s elite prep schools. The piece opens:

The road to Virginia Episcopal School was more secluded in those days, winding a few miles from the white section of segregated Lynchburg through a wood of maple and oak to the school’s rolling campus, shielded by trees and the more distant Blue Ridge Mountains. The usual stream of cars navigated the bends on the first day of school, white families ferrying their adolescent sons. Like nearly every other elite prep school in the South, it had been the boarding school’s tradition since its founding in 1916 that its teachers guide white boys toward its ideal of manhood — erudite, religious, resilient. But that afternoon of Sept. 8, 1967, a taxi pulled up the long driveway carrying a black teenager, Marvin Barnard. He had journeyed across the state, 120 miles by bus, from the black side of Richmond, unaccompanied, toting a single suitcase. In all of Virginia, a state whose lawmakers had responded to the 1954 court-ordered desegregation of public schools with a strategy of declared “massive resistance,” no black child had ever enrolled in a private boarding school. When Marvin stepped foot on V.E.S. ground, wearing a lightweight sport jacket, a white dress shirt, a modest necktie and a cap like the ones the Beatles were wearing, the white idyll was over.

The story is entitled “The Way To Survive It Was To Make A’s.” Check it out here. — CC

6 Comments on "Dateline ’67: NY Times On The First Black Prep Schoolers In The South"

  1. Powerful story.

  2. Sadly, I’ve used up all my free NYT articles this month. 142 of these scholarships were awarded by the Anne C. Stouffer Foundation out of Winston-Salem, N.C. in 1967, all to integrate private prep schools. The Stouffer’s wealth was from R.J. Reynolds.
    From what I’ve read there were two black students admitted to VES in 1967, they graduated 1 and 2 their senior year.

    From a style perspective check out this link for a comparison of their outfits from freshman year to senior year. Granted the change has more to do with the 1970s than the two gentlemen.

    https://www.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2017/09/bill-and-marvin-at-ves

  3. Still a remarkably preppy school. More so than neighboring prep schools better known for the (academic) grind.

  4. They literally had to survive the racists who were holding them out windows by the ankles.

  5. Richard Meyer | September 15, 2017 at 6:26 am |

    Inspiring story

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