Civil Rights in Central Virginia: Reverends shared frustration over segregation of city

Civil Rights in Central Virginia (sixth and last in a series): 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.

Related:

Civil Rights in Central Virginia: The Series

 

In 1961, the Revs. Virgil Wood and John Teeter stood together to voice a shared frustration and outrage over the segregation of Lynchburg.

It “makes you so blasted mad that the police think they can get away with this type of thing,” said Teeter, who just hours before was forcibly ejected from the local courthouse after challenging its color barrier.

Wood, a close colleague of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., condemned the court’s “Gestapo tactics” and urged listeners to don black armbands to mark the occasion.

“The hour has come to show our true colors and stand up to be counted,” he said.

Wood, a black Baptist minister, and Teeter, a white Episcopalian, both made headlines throughout their tenures here for their work in civil rights. A newspaper article on their respective departures from the city, just months apart, observed the two were “closely associated.”

Ten years ago, they returned and shared the stage at a local civil rights program organized to honor the history they had such a strong hand in shaping.

It was the first time the two had spoken in 36 years.

“We said hello and chatted and smiled,” said Teeter, who now lives in a retirement community in Rochester, N.Y. “That was about it. There was no animosity. He said sorry about any problems in the past. I remember him saying that. I think he was trying to let bygones be bygones.”Although linked in the public eye and bound together by their common mission, these two men of God often found themselves at odds with one other.

A very public falling out would occur toward the end of their time in Lynchburg, when both were summoned before the ominous-sounding state Committee on Offenses Against the Administration of Justice.

Today, the ministers speak of each other with respect but not affection.

“I would say sometimes we found ourselves on the opposite sides of issues,” said Wood, who’s also retired and living in Houston. “… At times, we would collaborate. But we had a different approach.”

The Beginning
By the close of the 1950s, the fire of change had been kindled in both Wood and Teeter, two young ministers living in different parts of the country.

Wood, a native of Albemarle County, left a church post in Rhode Island to move back south and join the burgeoning civil rights struggle.

“Vernon Johns said when you see a good fight, get in it,” he said, referencing the civil rights pioneer who once shepherded a Lynchburg church himself. “I think I saw a good fight.”

Wood, then age 26, arrived in Lynchburg with his wife and two children in 1958. He assumed the pulpit of Diamond Hill Baptist Church.

That same year, Teeter, a former newspaper reporter turned pastor, was overseeing a church in Rocky Mount.

The Ohio native said he didn’t come to the job with any plans to throw himself into the region’s growing social and political turmoil, but the conflict soon sought him out when his parishioners voted against integrating the diocese’s youth camp and conference center.

Teeter, who was 34, had no doubt about how he should respond. He promptly resigned.

“It seemed to me — and I was not alone — exceedingly undemocratic and unchristian,” he said, pointing to that moment as the spark for his own interest in the campaign for equality.

In need of a new church, he chose to sign on with the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd, a racially integrated but predominantly black congregation in Lynchburg. He and his family, which included four children, arrived in 1959.

“I could have gone various places up North, but I thought I would try to do something along the racial lines,” he said. “Of course, there was a cost to my family.”

“I remember the hatred my children experienced in school because I worked with blacks. … I’ve often wondered whether I was justified in exposing them to that. I hadn’t expected a bed of roses. I don’t know what I expected.”

The Struggle
Once in Lynchburg, Wood dove into the fight he came seeking, and today is credited by many as the architect of the local civil rights movement.

“He was a prime mover and motivator of the Lynchburg movement,” said Lanksford Hankins, a Virginia Theological Seminary and College student at the time.

“Before he initiated the Lynchburg Improvement Association (an advocacy group founded by Wood), everything was just complacency,” Hankins said. “Nothing was going well. As a result of his initiating things, as a result of his enthusiasm and zest for the cause, he pulled many of the people of Lynchburg into the movement.”

Wood led a years-long campaign of sit-ins, picket lines and boycotts to protest segregation in the city. Virtually every civil rights milestone recorded in Lynchburg during those years have his fingerprints on them in some way.

Teeter — who waged a personal boycott by refusing to enter any segregated facilities and encouraged others to follow suit — was one of the few, if not the only, white men in the community to take a public stand against segregation.

“He was a very, very, very, very fine person,” said Georgia Barksdale, whose daughter was one of the first two students to desegregate the all-white E.C. Glass High.

“I saw no difference in him than Rev. Wood or any of my friends,” Barksdale said. “And for him to have come on board with us, during those times when everything was segregated … Jack Teeter came onboard to fight for us.”

In the beginning, Wood and Teeter worked together to break down the barriers separating the city.

Over time, though, their paths began to drift. Wood became part of Dr. King’s inner circle, a group of young, passionate people constantly pressing for change and challenging authority.

“We were activists,” Wood said. “We challenged the laws and went to jail. We broke the laws and paid the price.”

Teeter, meanwhile, became vice president of the local NAACP, which employed a more conservative, less confrontational approach.

“It seemed to me they were forcing issues all the time,” Teeter said of Wood and company. “It was not helpful to the cause, from a political point of view. They had cut themselves off from some sources that could be helpful to them.”

“I did not think they were particularly helpful and I said so,” he added. “That was the cause of our differences. … He went his way and I went my way.”

The two ministers would still collaborate on occasion, as demonstrated by the 1961 meeting convened the same night the city’s first sit-in participants — known as the “Patterson Six” — began serving their jail sentences.

Teeter had made national news that day when he demanded to be seated in the black section of the courtroom for the group’s hearing; a photo of him being thrown out of the courthouse was picked up by media outlets everywhere.

The final split between Teeter and Wood would not begin until much later that year, when both were ordered to come before the state’s Committee on Offenses Against the Administration of Justice.

The committee — described in the Lynchburg paper as a legislative body investigating the various civil rights measures used “as (a) means of forcing integration” — demanded to know whether Teeter knew civil rights attorney Leonard Holt and whether Holt had asked him to join a discrimination suit against the Lynchburg government.

Teeter, the victim of an onslaught of public vitriol since his courthouse protest, initially refused to answer. He eventually cooperated — or in the words of the committee, “purged” himself — after being threatened with imprisonment.

Wood later rebuked Teeter publicly for that decision following his own appearance before the committee in 1962. The two had originally been subpoenaed around the same time, but Wood was excused due to illness. He responded to the second, later subpoena but refused to answer the committee’s questions.

According to a 1962 newspaper article: “Wood said the committee, in questioning him and his colleagues, ‘relied heavily upon what was presented as a signed and sworn affidavit of a white Lynchburg minister, the Rev. John H. Teeter, who has pretended to be a friend of the Negro and the integration movement.’ ”

Wood added, “We hold no animosity toward Mr. Teeter … We forgive him his trespass.”

The End
Teeter, who’s now 83, paused briefly while speaking by phone from his home in Rochester earlier this month.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about some of this stuff,” he said.

When the conversation turned toward the committee inquest, he did not address Wood’s admonition.

“I didn’t want to deal with them (the committee),” he said. “I had no desire. They actually came and dragged me there from my house.”

In the end, though, he said, he didn’t feel the information being sought from him merited going to jail. “So I told them, yes, I did know them.”

Ground down by the condemnation and harassment he faced as a result of his civil rights work, Teeter announced in April 1963 that he was leaving Lynchburg to take over a church in New York state.

Wood, who’s now 77, announced he was quitting the city for Boston just six months later.

The two do not remain in touch today.

Wood, also speaking by phone from his home, offered a placid assessment of the old breach.

“The NAACP had one approach, one contribution to make, and we had another,” he said. “I don’t know that I would call him (Teeter) a leader, but he did some things.”

“We had gains here and little setbacks there. One day, we really broke through. We arrived at a time when things were significantly better in Lynchburg.”

Wood has been back to the Hill City multiple times over the years, including for the 1999 civil rights ceremony titled “Lest We Forget.”

That commemoration, organized by Georgia Barksdale, included giving keys to the city to several of the local movement’s pioneers, including Wood and Teeter (Lanksford Hankins, now president of Eastern Theological Seminary in Lynchburg, was also an honoree).

For Teeter, the event marked his first and only visit back to the city. Lynchburg for him remains a mixed memory, he said. There were friendships to be sure, but also hatred from those aligned against integration.

“The world has changed, hasn’t it?” he said, reflecting on the state of race relations today, including Barack Obama’s ascent to the presidency. “Maybe not as much as we think it has, but it has changed a great deal. For the better, I think.”

“I try to think of the good things in the past,” he added. “Things weren’t always so good, but they’re gone now. I don’t need to dwell on them.”

Coming in The News & Advance:
INAUGURATING THE PRESIDENT
Monday, Jan. 19: Commemorative Barack Obama Inauguration Section
Tuesday, Jan. 20: Live coverage online, plus a look at where you can watch the inauguration in the area
Wednesday, Jan. 21: Special Barack Obama Inauguration Edition