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Show THE DAILY HERALD, Pnno, I lah, Sunday, March Page E4 10, 19 Battle lines in the South being drawn again Milestones Editor 's note: Not far from the battlefield where Dixie fell stands a monument to the fall of segregated schools. Sow the developers want to tear down the old schoollwuse where young black students acting on their own walked out in protest 45 years ago. Again, battle lines are drawn. By BILL BASKERVILL Associated Press Writer Hjorth golden Paul A. and Mamie M. Hjorth celebrated their golden wedding anniversary at a family dinner on Saturday. Paul served four years in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He was discharged January 946 and they were married March X, 1946. in the Salt Lake I.DS Temple. They made their home in Springville. Both are active in civic affairs and the LDS Church. They are workers in the Provo Temple. Paul received the Boy Scouts of America Second Miler Award. They are the parents of six sons Alan. Gary, Duane, Lynn. Arden and Lee. They have 18 grandchildren. Gillespie two-wee- celebrates 80th birthday Robert "Bob" Gillespie celebrated his 8()lh birthday at a family party at his home on March 9. I le was born March 9, 191 6, in Provo to Sharp and Eva Gillespie of Provo. He graduated from Lincoln High School where he play football and basketball. He served an LDS mission to He gradGermany from 1937-3uated from Brigham Young University June 4, 1941, the same day he married Wilma Wiscombe in the Salt Lake LDS Temple. He worked as an educator and then as an engineer for U.S. Steel Geneva Works Plant for 30 years. As a faithful member of the LDS Church, he has served in many positions as well as a temple worker at the Provo Temple. He has been active coaching football and little league and served with the Boy Scouts of America. He was a member of the Lions Club and served on the SCERA Board for many years. He is the father of Petrea Kelly, Highland; Richard" Gillespie, Decatur, Texas; Paul Gillespie, Bus Gillespie and Mary Taylor, all of Provo; Robert Gillespie, Salt Lake City, John Gillespie, Orem and Jeff Gillespie, Vineyard. He has 50 grandchildren and seven 10-da- V 0. rs birthday AT Vie Daily Herahl's policy is to run biiilidax announcements for anvone 85, 90, 95 cuui 100 Twice The Service "Carl&Dottie" or 1 Thornhill H II "5Xf AP Photo dents waled out in to protest the inferior conditions at the black school, leading eventually to the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated public schools. Vera J. Allen, photographed in February, is trying to purchase the historic Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville, Va., as a memorial to the civil rights struggle. Stu-- dren continued their education in a whites-onl- y private school that opened almost immediately after the public schools were shut down. Some black children attended school in other Virginia localities or in other states, but many others dropped out and never resumed their education. President Kennedy told a 1963 news conference, "There are only four places in the world where children are denied the right to attend school: North Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea and Prince Edward County." A year later the Supreme Court ordered Prince Edward to reopen its schools. The job of saving Moton now falls to a black service club, the Martha E. Forrester Council of Women. The county gave the group a deadline of Dec. 31, 1997, to raise of the $300,000 needed to buy the school. Vera J. Allen, president of the Forrester organization, says the county is asking too much for Moton. "We think we paid for it," when the school was built with tax money in 1939, she says. Members of the council and others who want to use the school as a black history museum say they will not allow Moton to be demolished. The county wants to get rid of the school because "it's an eyesore and a mindsore," says Thomas Mayfield, who was a vocational agriculture teacher at Moton when the students walked out. "It's a reminder of the stupidity of those who perpetuated the closing of (county) schools and segregation." The county says it needs to sell the school building and the adjoining athletic fields (priced separately at $700,000) to help pay for a 1951 sider that possibility." "A small group of older black people wants to preserve it," she says. "Younger ones are in favor of closing it and getting rid of it." Prince Edward native Lacy B. Ward Jr. disputed that. Ward, a field representative for U.S. Rep. L.F. Payne, says he does not believe many black people feel that way. "I think people in my age group all have parents who were in school then," says Ward, 35, who is black. "It's far from forgotten." Black leaders say the Moton school is as important to them as new school. Longwood College is the likely buyer of the playing fields that border its campus, but the college says it lacks the the Moton building to buy money and renovate and maintain it as a historical site. County Administrator Mildred B. Hampton says the Forrester group is being given "every opportunity to come up with the money." Asked if the school would be sold to developers if the council doesn't raise the funds, Ms, Hampton said, "We would have to con state-support- : r v "1 two-thir- V David O. McKay Special Events Center, UVSC J sirSatwliw , HI "'-K- 1 I I v v App!:nncc3 PLANA: PLANB: CK PACK LUNCH PACK SOFT DRINKS ICECREAM p- A Draperies VaKpapcr Carpeting SOFT DRINKS ICECREAM NACHOS, PLANC: PARTY HEARTY! SOFT DRINKS ICECREAM HOTDOCa 71lo;;!' v; Water Systems Now 600 To ChooM From Prom Dresses KvgpoJ PS 'tI p?005 f f.ueh toro 49-486- Be Spring! 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The FARMYTLLE, Va. deserted brick schoolhouse seems vulnerable and out of place at the corner of a busy intersection. Lost amid the traffic is a marker that notes the school's historic role in ending the "separate but equal" system of segregated schools. The building sits atop a triangular site developers prize as com- mercial real estate. County officials may sell the site to them next year. What happened at Robert Russa Moton High School 45 years ago may not have been as important as Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House 25 miles away, but it has special meaning to black citizens who have launched a campaign to save the school from the wrecking ball. On April 23, 1951, all 456 Moton students, led by senior Barbara Johns, walked out to protest the vastly inferior conditions of black schools in Prince Edward County. White schools had extensive libraries and science labs as well as gymnasiums, says Edwilda Allen k Isaac, who participated in the strike as a Moton eighth-grade- r. '"In our biology lab we had one frog." Moton, with eight classrooms and a central auditorium, was designed to accommodate 180 students; the overflow attended class in a bus and three wood-fram- e buildings covered with tar paper. The Moton students,, acting without the knowledge of parents or teachers, sought only parity with white schools, not integration. But the walkout accomplished more than the teen-ageever dreamed. A month after the strike began, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sued on behalf of the Moton students to integrate Prince Edward schools. The lawsuit failed in federal court in Richmond. The NAACP then combined the suit with similar court actions in Kansas, Delaware, South Carolina and Washington, D.C. The eventual ruling in the case, the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education declared segregated decision, schools unconstitutional. The ruling also triggered an era of "massive resistance" in Virginia, and Prince Edward became the epicenter. The county closed its public schools rather than mix black and white students. Most white chil- - Paul and Mamie Hjorth sgf4 till 0 oft some of the nearby Civ il War sites. Tearing down the building would amount to historical discrimination. Mayfield says. "We have a right to our history." The Moton School remained in sen ice through the 1994-9- 5 school year, its final use as Farmville Elementary School. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places last year despite delays sought by the county Board of Supervisors and H. Alexander Wise Jr., director of the state Department of Historic Resources. The state Historic Preservation Review Board had unanimouy recommended including Moton on the register and two members chairman Tony P. Wrenn and vice chairman S. Allen Chambers Jr. took the matter directly to the federal government after Wise refused to nominate the school. In an Aug. 9. 1995. letter to Wrenn and Chambers, Wise agreed that Moton was historically significant but said considering it for the national register was "a complex issue requiring local resolution." Wrenn said in an interview that for live years the review board had studied Moton's inclusion on the national register. "The question before the board was whether it met the criteria of the national register," he said. Historic designation w ill not bar the county from selling the school. "But it does give the message that the thing we're talking about is something of historical and cultural importance to the community." Wrenn said. Ken Woodley, editor of the weekly Farmville Herald, supports preserving Moton. He has written editorials denouncing what he calls the county's ambivalence toward saving Moton. -- ---- .- Communications World Marketicj! Alliance r East 200 South, Pleasant Grove nnnnniiiiuuuLJLi - - LlTc: OarJ-'l- J ClI 225-577- 7 . |