Civil Rights in Central Virginia: From student to activist

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Civil Rights in Central Virginia: The Series

 

Civil Rights in Central Virginia: With Barack Obama poised to become the nation’s first black President, The News & Advance looks at significant post-1950s civil rights moments in Lynchburg.

Rebecca Owen heard the sound of Christmas carols drifting through the air. But only for a moment.

It was Dec. 14, 1960, when the “Patterson Six” walked into the segregated lunch counter of Patterson’s Drug Store and tried to order coffee.

Owen, a religion major, just days away from her 21st birthday, remembered the merry music came to a swift halt when the crowd at Patterson’s Drug Store spotted her party — a group of six college students comprised of members of the all-white Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, the all-white Lynchburg College and, shockingly, the all-black Virginia Theological Seminary and College.

Somewhere, someone cut the music. A stunned silence settled over the store.

“In my mind, time slowed down,” Owen said years later while speaking at Randolph, her alma mater. “People slowed down. Like two-dimensional images. And the silence, I remember.”

“It was in that moment in that drugstore I saw in their faces the mirror of something incredibly … obscene is the word that comes to mind. Something dirty. The spectacle of white and black students sitting at a lunch counter together.”

“To be seen in that way, to see myself in that mirror, was a strange experience,” she said. “I was not ashamed of what I was doing. I knew it was what I wanted to do. But I felt shame.”

A pioneer of civil rights locally

This sit-in would be the first of Lynchburg’s civil rights movement, but by no means the last.

Owen, a privileged daughter of the South who was taught integration should be brought about slowly, was a principal organizer of the demonstration and is remembered today as one of the pioneers of the local civil rights struggle.

In 2002, she passed away following a battle with cancer. She was 61. Her story here is culled from her own words as relayed in a taped speech she delivered at Randolph in 2000 and in her contribution to the book “Journeys that Opened Up the World: Women, Student Christian Movements, and Social Justice, 1955-1975.”

Owen, known as Becky to her friends, was a senior at Randolph in the winter of 1960 and a respected leader among her classmates.

“She had an incredible intellect and a capacity to reflect and speak her thoughts really fearlessly,” Alice Ball, a dormmate and close friend, said during a recent interview. “She was somebody everyone looked up to and sort of revered in a certain sense.”

“It was almost unthinkable — remember this was the end of the ‘50s. We were still ‘50s kids,” she said. “… Becky was kind of a harbinger of what was to come in the ‘60s. Not to put too grand a point on it. She’d probably kick me under the table if she heard me say that. But she was certainly ahead of the rest of us.”

Time to take a stand

Owen’s father, a banker from Saluda, always said his daughter’s activism could be blamed on the Methodist Church.

She didn’t disagree.

It was Owen’s participation in the student Methodist movement that first took her outside Virginia to attend na-tional and international conferences.

It was there she lived for the first time in an integrated environment, with black and white students engaging in activities together. It was where she first heard black students speak of the hardships of living under Jim Crow. And it was also where she, in the summer of 1960, met some of the Greensboro, N.C., students that staged the nation’s first civil rights sit-ins.

“The imperative was … unambiguous,” she wrote later, “if you, Becky Owen, are serious about Christianity and injustice, get the hell back to Lynchburg and do something.”

She lived up to those words. Upon her return, she reached out to the Rev. Virgil Wood, a Lynchburg pastor and civil rights leader. She and classmates also began organizing cross-campus discussion groups that brought students of both races together to trade ideas on race and segregation.

Over time, discussion evolved into action. The group agreed to approach some of the city’s segregated businesses and raise the possibility of integration.

The first place on their list was Patterson’s Drug Store. Mr. Patterson — who would later serve as a prosecution witness in multiple sit-in trials — refused their invitation.

The Patterson Six take action

The Patterson Six, the name given to the group by a disapproving local press, talked it over and made up their minds. They sought no outside advice. Ball herself was unaware of their actions until she got a call from Owen later that night.

The group was in jail and needed bail money.

Newspaper accounts of the arrest noted the group was locked up without supper. It was reported the three male students were searched for weapons (none found). No mention was made of any parallel treatment of the three women.

Owen herself, who was alternately given to laughter and long silences as she waded through these memories, recalled the quandary authorities found themselves in when the paddy wagon arrived. The etiquette of the day usually demanded boys and girls be seated separately in such situations, but in this case that would mean seating black and white students together. The officers had to decide which morality took precedence.

After some debate, Owen recalled with amusement, they decided segregation trumped modesty.

“That’s kind of symbolic, maybe, or emblematic of how unprepared Lynchburg was for this,” she said. “They didn’t know what to do with us. I think they genuinely didn’t.”

They learned, she added, and succeeded in making things more difficult for those who followed.

The students’ subsequent disciplinary hearings and criminal trial would occupy the headlines for months to come. Public reaction ranged from steadfast support to outright disgust.

Deepest distress or finest hour?

At Randolph, many were horrified by the unfeminine behavior of the girls involved and worried over the damage it might inflict on the image of the proper all-girl’s school.

“At the time, many saw the situation as a moment of deepest distress for the college,” Carolyn Bell, a Randolph alum who later wrote a history of the school, said in 2000. “Others saw it as Randolph-Macon’s finest hour.”

Public pressure came to bear on the white colleges involved, with calls for the students’ expulsion. Randolph convened a hearing of the student judiciary committee, which Owen until then had been a member of.

In the end, no formal punishment was meted out, but school leaders spoke out against the sit-in at a mandatory student assembly.

“I felt very soundly reprimanded,” Owen said. “… We had set back race relations. We had broken the law, and it was intolerable to break the law. We had put Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in jeopardy. This was an entire assembly. Again, it wasn’t that I thought I acted incorrectly. But I felt so shamed.”

The Patterson Six were convicted of trespassing and sentenced to 30 days in jail, where they flummoxed au-thorities with their requests for academic tomes and steady stream of visitors and letters of support.

From jail, Owen wrote her worried parents cheerful letters that glossed over her situation. She was so convincing, her mother, ever the proper Southern lady, wrote the jailer a letter of thanks for providing such excellent care.

‘What more could you ask for?’

Owen graduated from Randolph the following spring and left the state to attend graduate school in New York — a move inspired, in part, by the advice of a state investigator assigned to determine whether she had any Communist affiliation. (At the time, it was common for civil rights activists to be accused of harboring Communist motives).

Owen went on to establish her own psychotherapy practice. At the time of her death, she was married with two grown children.

Her pain over the sit-in’s aftermath lingered into adulthood, particularly her sense of anger over Randolph’s handling of it — “I’m not taking it back,” she said in 2000. “There was a lot to be angry about.”

But Ball, who remained friends with Owen until the latter’s death, said she felt her old classmate’s return to the school years later was a healing journey. “If she’d let it be said.”

Speaking by phone from her home in Atlanta, Ball, a past president of Randolph’s board of trustees, reflected on the changes time has brought to the school and the world — a theme Owen would also address in her later writings with a sense of wonder and joy.

“There’s been much discussion about our journeys,” Ball concluded, speaking of the Randolph community specifically. “And it’s been very satisfying to me to see how people who were our most outspoken critics have chewed on this over the years and come to understand what happened.”

“One classmate said she was glad we did it. She couldn’t believe we did it, but she learned so much from it. What more could you ask for?”

***

The Patterson Six began serving a 30-day jail sentence on Feb. 6, 1961. They were released early for good behavior.

The students were: Rebecca M. Owen, 21, of Saluda, and Mary Edith Bentley, 20, of Newark, N.J., both of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College; Barbara A. Thomas, 21, of Lynchburg, and Kenneth V. Greene, 28, of Lynchburg, both students at Virginia Theological Seminary and College; and George T. Brumback, 20, of Arlington, and James E. Hunter, 19, of Indianapolis, both of Lynchburg College.