Darrell Laurant: When the doors of change opened

Think about it.

You’re a teenager, at a point in your life when the last thing you want to be is different from everyone else. All your instincts of ego-preservation are telling you to look, act, talk and think like your peers. You want to be noticed, and yet not noticed. You want to fit in.

Now imagine you are Lynda Woodruff and Owen Cardwell in January of 1962, getting ready for your first day in a new school.

Even under normal circumstances, making that transition at mid-year would be painful. You’re about to be smacked in the face by an academic wave that is just beginning to crest, and you’ve missed all the basic first-semester building blocks designed to lift you above it.

As for friends, the high school cliques have already solidified, the officers of the clubs chosen, the pecking order established. As the new kids, you’re on the outside looking in.

That’s under normal circumstances. Now imagine that you are two black teenagers preparing to walk into a large student body — E.C. Glass High School — that is 100 percent white. In 1962, that was a reason for fear as well as discomfort. There were places in the South where “agitators” had been killed for less. The fact that a federal judge said Woodruff and Cardwell had the right to be there was probably of little comfort.

But they walked up the front steps and in the front door, and there was no violence. The next few years were extremely difficult for them at times, but the opposition to their presence was more psychological than physical.

That was 50 years ago this month. I wasn’t there – I was a sophomore at another high school that was all white, but in Upstate New York. Still, I’ve written about the events of Jan. 29, 1962 so often since coming to Lynchburg that it has almost insinuated itself into my memory, as if I was actually one of the kids peering out a window at the unfolding spectacle, the police lines, the tightly-composed faces of Woodruff and Cardwell as they marched forward.

I wouldn’t have contributed to their mental torture, but I probably wouldn’t have defended them, either. My hope would have been that this unsettling pulse of change would subside without affecting me in any way.

Woodruff and Cardwell weren’t so lucky. And I wasn’t really there.

So here’s what really interests me, what holds my fascination with a story that I’ve told and retold. What led up to this two-person invasion of the status quo, an act that had as much chance of “integrating” E.C. Glass as a water glass full of food coloring would have of turning the James River green? Why them? Why then?

Basically, I am only a conduit for other peoples’ memories, and I’d love to hear yours. Certainly I will talk to Lynda Woodruff and Owen Cardwell once again, and probably learn something new about their experience – I always do.

Yet I’d also like to hear from their friends and teachers at Dunbar High School and then at Glass, and even from those Glass students who were peering out the windows and holding their breath.

I realize it was a long time ago. Most of those teachers are probably gone now, or the memories have faded. Still, if something about that day and those events stuck in your mind, I’d like to know.

It’s a story that can always be told again – maybe better this time.