In 1960, 16-year-old Jerine Mercer protests segregation by carrying a sign in front of the W.T. Grant store in Fredericksburg.
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Display recalls 'massive resistance'
New Fredericksburg Area Museum exhibit features powerful images from 1960s civil rights struggle in Virginia
Date published: 9/14/2006
By MICHAEL ZITZ
It was a time when there was massive resistance to passive resistance.
"Passive resistance" was a term used to describe non-violent protests against segregation in the 1960s.
"Massive resistance" was the way Virginia's vehement opposition to federal orders to desegregate the state was described.
A new exhibit at the Fredericksburg Area Museum and Cultural Center is brimming with bold images from the civil rights movement.
A political cartoon of the time depicts the Virginia massive resistance against federal court desegregation orders as the Civil War battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac.
Two of the images are from 1960 Fredericksburg.
Those two pictures have been added to a traveling exhibit, on loan from the Virginia Historical Society.
The photographs show protestors carrying placards in front of the W.T. Grant store on Caroline Street in downtown Fredericksburg.
In one picture, 16-year-old Jerine Mercer carries a sign that reads "If God is for us, who can be against us?"
In the other, 15-year-old Gaye Todd (now Gaye Adegbalola) carries a placard that reads "My stomach may be empty, but what about your heart?"
The exhibit also includes a photograph of the late Spotsylvania County resident James Farmer, who essentially started the civil rights movement when he began organizing nonviolent sit-ins in Chicago in 1942. He had founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) that year. The group later put together the famous Freedom Rides to desegregate transportation in the South. Farmer taught at Mary Washington College in the final years of his life.
"If it hadn't been for brave people like him, where would we be today?" Mary Helen Dellinger, curator of the museum, said of Farmer. "What would the United States be like?"
The exhibit features a 1960s-era lunch counter similar to those that were the stage for many protests in the state.
Lunch counter sit-ins protested "Jim Crow" laws that enforced segregation.
A huge photograph behind the lunch counter shows a scene in Richmond seconds before a fight broke out during one such protest.
The exhibit also features Ku Klux Klan posters, one of which reads, "Be a man, join the Klan."
Another poster urges whites to attend a White Power rally in Alexandria in 1966.
"You can tell feelings were running hot," Dellinger said.
A life-size photograph of a protest march in Richmond shows black girls who appeared to be about 14 or 15 and who were obviously nervous, forging ahead, trying to look unconcerned as white protestors loomed above them, waving a huge Confederate flag.
Dellinger said she hopes the exhibit will interest area schoolchildren in learning more about the bravery involved in the civil rights struggle.
To reach MICHAEL ZITZ: 540/374-5408
Email: mikez@freelancestar.com
WHAT: 'The Civil Rights Movement in Virginia' exhibit
WHERE: The Fredericksburg Area Museum and Cultural Center, 907 Princess Anne St.
WHEN: Opens Monday
COST: Adults $5, students $1.
INFO: famcc.org, 540/371-3037
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Date published: 9/14/2006
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