2.5 Introduction to Petitions

Using a petition to ask the government for change is a right guaranteed all citizens by the US Constitution, which African-Americans in Loudoun learned from the Quakers, yet during segregation would have been risky for them. It was therefore a special pleasure in the early days of the project’s research, to come across a tight roll of red paper tied up with string. We untied the string and allowed the paper to naturally open and flatten, which took a week What we discovered was a stack of petitions by parents and teachers trying to improve the lives of their children and students. One group (2.5.A) were written by African-Americans and the other group (2.5.B) were by Whites. In our opinion, each of the petitions is a monument to the struggle for equal education. They represent a true treasure, so we are in the process of developing a specific book on them. We are also scanning all of them, transcribing the text and developing biographies on the teachers and authors, often parents, so that the people who took the time to write the petitions won’t be forgotten.
We also need to keep in mind of that some of the “colored” petitions were also signed by white citizens, sometimes ordinary neighbors and at other times by prominent members of society such as John Ryan, a former Speaker of the House of Delegates, who supported the African-American community in Conklin. The lesson there is that while segregation was the law of the land and certainly unfairly inhibited African-Americans, not all white citizens believed in total separation. There was a gray area, which both African-American and White former students have told us about. Many were friends who played and talked together and did not understand the point of the law.
Still, some citizens were almost violently opposed to integration, to the point of potentially shutting down the public school system if forced to integrate. Further, the School Board tried to force the African-American community to agree to segregation in return for repairs and structural improvements to which they had a right. In other words, while northern Virginia was not Mississippi, neither was it an environment of equality under the law.
Because Superintendent Emerick did not permit citizens to attend School Board Meetings unless they were registered to vote, a high bar for African-Americans, petitions were often the most effective tool they had to influence the government.