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WORK TITLE: We Face the Dawn
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 8/18/1947
WEBSITE: https://www.margaretedds.com/
CITY: Richmond
STATE: VA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born August 18, 1947, in Harlan County, KY; daughter of Tom and Sara Edds; married Bob Lipper (a journalist; retired); children: three.
EDUCATION:Received degrees from Tennessee Wesleyan College and University of Richmond.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author and journalist. Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, VA, began as statehouse reporter, became editorial writer; retired.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Author and journalist Margaret Edds spent her career as a reporter in Virginia working mostly on civil rights issues, and her books reflect her expertise in the area. She is the author of Free at Last: What Really Happened When Civil Rights Came to Southern Politics, Claiming the Dream: The Victorious Campaign of Douglas Wilder of Virginia, An Expendable Man: The Near-execution of Earl Washington, Jr., Finding Sara: A Daughter’s Journey, and We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team That Dismantled Jim Crow.
Free at Last
In Free at Last, Edds examined the impact that the Civil Rights Act of 1965—the act that gave the U.S. government both the power and the responsibility to ensure that African Americans enjoy the same rights and protections that other Americans do—had over two decades throughout the American South. According to Edds’ reporting African Americans, wrote a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “are destined to play an increasingly aggressive role in Southern politics.” However, she also found that, although African Americans voted more often (voter registration more than doubled during the period) and the number of Black Americans holding office had increased by nearly 500 percent, racism was still common, and the economic circumstances of most blacks had not significantly changed.
“Edds’s thorough and perceptive reporting focuses heavily on the question of just how much of a difference the election of those hundreds of black public officials has made in the lives of their often-needy black constituents. The answer, as she repeatedly makes clear, is that there has been less of a positive effect than many civil rights observers hoped for,” explained David J. Garrow in the Washington Post. “Edds correctly recognizes that excessive expectations are more of the explanation than is poor performance.”
An Expendable Man and Finding Sara
An Expendable Man examines the arrest, trial, and incarceration of Earl Washington, a black agricultural worker. Washington was accused of the 1983 rape and murder of a white woman in rural Culpeper, Virginia. Washington was exonerated—but only after spending nearly two decades in prison. “Through the efforts of a fellow death row inmate,” wrote Francis Sandiford in Library Journal, “… Washington was pardoned on DNA evidence.”
Edds relates a story of her own family in Finding Sara, “the story of her mother, Sara Edds, who died in 1950, when Margaret was just three years old,” said Karen Hall in the Marshall County Tribune. “Fortunately, family members were devoted to the written word, and Margaret found a treasure-trove of letters to and from Sara.” “Not everyone will have a cache of letters. But nearly all of us can find out more about our mothers, or at least experience something of the world in which they lived,” Edds declared in an article appearing in the Knoxville News Sentinel. “Letters, diaries, interviews with surviving family members, and childhood memories of summer holidays spent with her grandfather in Delina [Tennessee], and her aunt Eleanor in Belvidere [Tennessee],” Hall continued, “enabled Margaret to write her mother’s story.”
We Face the Dawn
It was only after “retiring from the newspaper in 2007, and completing a book drawn from letters to and from my mother,” Edds explained in an autobiographical essay appearing on her home page, the Margaret Edds Website, “that opportunity and interest in Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson aligned.” She writes about lawyers Hill and Robinson in We Face the Dawn, the story of the civil rights cases that led to the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision that launched the modern civil rights movement. The volume, declared Jackie Kruszewski in the Virginia Lawyer, “is a legal thriller of the nonfiction variety—a years-long story of the concerted, coordinated, meticulous effort to change the racial laws that oppressed black communities across the South. Robinson and Hill headed that front in Virginia, and Edds writes a thorough, compelling profile of the courage and diligence of the two men and their associates. And, in a time when the outcomes of the civil rights movement are roundly celebrated, she reminds readers of the challenges and dangers the men faced every step of the way.”
Hill and Robinson were thoroughly prepared to meet the challenges to civil rights that were unique to Virginia. Although the state saw less open violence directed against African Americans, racism persisted through discriminatory hiring, denial of credit, and segregation of housing. Black schools were separate, as allowed by the Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson, but they were never equal to facilities for white students. “The groundbreaking work that Hill and Robinson accomplished for equal educational opportunities was hatched at Howard University Law School,” stated Karen Newton in Style Weekly. “There Hill joined his friend, Thurgood Marshall, as part of a group of up-and-coming black lawyers and faculty members trained by legendary Vice Dean Charles Hamilton Houston to reshape America using legal challenges to racially biased laws.” “A brilliant young attorney working with the older Hill,” contended a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “Robinson had gone about that work energetically, even as the Supreme Court made a key decision in 1949 to desegregate state universities.”
Reviewers celebrated the release of Edds’s study. “Edds spent six and a half years working on We Face the Dawn,” said Kruszewski. “Driven by the need to understand ‘Who were these men?’ she says, the resulting book masterfully weaves together the legal battles with personal struggles and character sketches.” “With unobtrusive eloquence and reserved passion, Edds depicts an era during which much was accomplished and reminds us that much remains to be realized,” declared Jay Strafford in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.” “Vivid and vital, ‘We Face the Dawn’ lays out the lessons of the past, warns of the dangers of the present and illuminates the times of two stalwart men and the splendor of their achievements.” “Edds’s extensive use of correspondence, contemporary newspaper accounts, memos and court documents brings the era of Oliver Hill to life,” stated Michael L. Ramsey in the Roanoke Times. “The reader is presented with vibrant portrayals of Roanoke, Richmond, and Washington from the perspective of successful African-American entrepreneurs, lawyers and other professionals and their business, social, and religious lives in a community of neighborhoods. ‘We Face the Dawn’ is a welcome addition to the [civil rights] story.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2018, review of We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team That Dismantled Jim Crow.
Knoxville News Sentinel (Knoxville, TN), May 9, 2010, Margaret Edds, “Paper Trail Reveals a Lot about Moms.”
Library Journal, August, 2003, Frances Sandiford, “Death Row Conversions,” p. 107.
Marshall County Tribune (Lewisburg, TN), July 30, 2010, Karen Hall, “‘Finding Sara’ Tells Family’s Story.”
Publishers Weekly, June 24, 1987, review of Free at Last: What Really Happened When Civil Rights Came to Southern Politics.
Richmond Times-Dispatch (Richmond, VA), February 1, 2018, Jay Strafford, review of We Face the Dawn.
Roanoke Times (Roanoke, VA), March 25, 2018, Michael L. Ramsey, “‘We Face the Dawn’ Recreates Roanoke in Period between the Wars.”
Style Weekly, February 6, 2018, Karen Newton, “A New Book by Margaret Edds Examines the Legacy of Civil Rights Lawyers Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill.”
Virginia Lawyer, April, 2018, Jackie Kruszewski, “Resisting Jim Crow,” p. 54.
Washington Post, May 31, 1987, David J. Garrow, “The Limits of Political Power.”
ONLINE
Margaret Edds Website, https://www.margaretedds.com (June 22, 2018), author profile.
About the Author
The possibility of a book about Virginia’s leading civil rights icons intrigued me for many years. It seemed a natural culmination of my thirty-four-year immersion in Virginia politics and government, first as a statehouse reporter and then as an editorial writer for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. A focus on racial justice threaded that career, including book-length studies involving the nation’s first popularly elected black governor, the results of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and a criminal justice system that sometimes crucifies innocents.
It was not until retiring from the newspaper in 2007, and completing a book drawn from letters to and from my mother, that opportunity and interest in Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson aligned. By then, both men were deceased, and my five-year research project depended heavily on archival material and interviews with their family, co-workers, and acquaintances. Even so, my personal glimpses of the men informed the record.
I spoke only once with Judge Robinson—at the fortieth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Even in that brief encounter, he displayed the politeness and integrity that were defining characteristics. He weighed my request for an interview and declined, citing his desire to avoid any appearance of conflict while serving the federal courts as a senior judge. Luckily, Hill was less reticent. Listening to his memories as he sat in the Richmond courtroom where he and Robinson argued Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County remains a highlight of my journalistic career.
That journey began with college internships at the Nashville Tennessean in the late 1960s. I was born in Harlan County, Kentucky; grew up in a Nashville suburb; and earned degrees from Tennessee Wesleyan College and the University of Richmond. Hill and Robinson’s birthplace, Richmond, has been home for the last thirty-eight years. I live here with my husband, Bob Lipper, also a retired journalist. We cherish three adult children and their families.
A New Book by Margaret Edds Examines the Legacy of Civil Rights Lawyers Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill
BY KAREN NEWTON
click to enlarge
Author Margaret Edds stands at the statue of civil rights lawyers Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill at Capital Square, holding her new book “We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team that Dismantled Jim Crow.”
Scott Elmquist
Author Margaret Edds stands at the statue of civil rights lawyers Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill at Capital Square, holding her new book “We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team that Dismantled Jim Crow.”
Many otherwise informed Richmonders would have a tough time pinpointing why there are statues of Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill on Capital Square.
Margaret Edds isn't one of them. A former statehouse reporter and editorial writer, the retired Norfolk Virginian-Pilot journalist explains that she covered a lot of race-related issues because it was impossible to cover politics in the South without getting into racism.
Her recently published book, "We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team that Dismantled Jim Crow," was a six-and-a-half year effort to research and share the two men's stories. She dug into the archives at the Library of Congress to read through the papers of the NAACP and at Virginia State University to read Hill's papers.
She interviewed people who'd known both men, acknowledging that it was a dwindling group with each passing year.
"I went through all the local African-American newspapers from the '40s and '50s to see what was happening from a black perspective," she recalls. The biggest challenge turned out to be the imbalance of information on the two legendary figures.
Hill was an active presence in Richmond, moving effortlessly in a variety of social circles. While running for state legislature, he sat with white voters to have a beer, prompting Edds to write that his "refusal to accept that he did not belong was perhaps even more ground-breaking than his candidacy."
Robinson, she discovered, was a much quieter, more private man. Yet both men were equally influential and models of citizenship.
"What they persevered through was huge and they kept going without bitterness," she marvels. "They fought relentlessly for the cause without losing faith in humanity or hating the work."
The groundbreaking work that Hill and Robinson accomplished for equal educational opportunities was hatched at Howard University Law School. There Hill joined his friend, Thurgood Marshall, as part of a group of up-and-coming black lawyers and faculty members trained by legendary Vice Dean Charles Hamilton Houston to reshape America using legal challenges to racially biased laws.
Marshall tasked Robinson with going county-to-county through Virginia, first to investigate inequalities in schools, then to prepare lawsuits. Robinson, a workaholic, took on the project energetically and meticulously.
"Learning who they were and what they did was a revelation," Edds says. "The extent of the resistance they faced — a commission was formed to discredit and disbar them — was nothing compared to how determined they were to defy them. They endured a lot."
A year-long investigation of the disparities in white and black schools led to lawsuits by the two exposing how the ludicrous notion of separate but equal played out in the Commonwealth. Edds says these cases were the key underpinning for the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Once the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, Marshall not only asked Robinson to fine-tune the pleadings but to argue the case in court with him.
Having learned the key roles the two men played in American history, Edds would like to see both Hill and Robinson taught as part of the Virginia Standards of Learning.
"Their story feels very timely right now as events like Charlottesville remind us that racism is a thing again and schools are being re-segregated," she says. "I see them as inspiration and role models for a new generation to pick up the torch of racial and human progress and move it forward." S
"We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team that Dismantled Jim Crow" book release is held Feb. 8 at 5:30 p.m. at Library of Virginia, 800 E. Broad St. The author speaks Feb. 12 at 6 p.m. at Chop Suey, 2913 W. Cary St. and Feb. 13 at 6:30 p.m.
Paper trail reveals a lot about moms
Finding Sara: A Daughter's Journey by Margaret Edds
Finding Sara: A Daughter's Journey by Margaret Edds
By Margaret Edds, Special To The News Sentinel
Posted: May 09, 2010 0
If my story is a tribute to the power of letters, it's also a plea to other women to mine their treasure. Not everyone will have a cache of letters. But nearly all of us can find out more about our mothers, or at least experience something of the world in which they lived, if we set our minds to it.
Like a historian, ask questions, observe and explore. Delve beneath the surface of your mother's life through interviews with relatives, friends and former neighbors. Take trips to communities in which she lived. Make library dates with books, magazines and newspaper articles describing the times in which she lived.
Pore over primary source material - letters or diaries, if you're lucky enough to have them, but also old photographs or handed-down possessions. Spend time reflecting on the items she cherished. Do you know the name of a book she loved? Read it. Any clues about the type of music she preferred? Listen to what was popular in her day.
Start by making a time line. It's astonishing what that can reveal. Don't just fill in the obvious milestones, but secondary ones as well. Was she a teenager or a young mother when major world events occurred? Where was she, and in what stage of life, when her parents died or her siblings married?
How was your mother influenced by the way she was raised? What was the relationship like between your mother and your grandmother? If your mother is alive and you can get her talking about her own mother, it may ease the way into more intimate conversation about her challenges and dreams as a young girl.
Consider her family's economic circumstances and the prevailing mores of the community in which she came of age. What opportunities were open to her? What doors were closed?
Whatever your relationship with your mother, your reward will be a deeper understanding of how she became the woman you know.
And one last thing. If you have children, or nieces and nephews, create a paper legacy, even if it's no more than putting a few printed e-mails into a file. Curiosity about family history is eternal.
Death row conversions
Library Journal. 128.13 (Aug. 2003): p107.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Edds, Margaret. An Expendable Man: The Near-Execution of Earl Washington, Jr.
New York Univ. Aug. 2003. 235p. photogs. index. 0-8147-2222-9. $27.95. LAW
In 1983, Earl Washington, an impoverished, mentally retarded black farmhand, was convicted of the rape and murder of a white woman in Culpepper, VA. Washington spent 18 years in prison--nine of them on death row--with the sanction of the U.S. Supreme Court. Through the efforts of a fellow death row inmate, who gained the attention of a New York law firm, Washington was pardoned on DNA evidence. This book, written by a Virginia Pilot reporter who interviewed Washington, recounts the process by which the pardon came about. By no means unbiased journalism, the book contends that individulals like Washington are considered expendable by the American justice system. One of the unique features of the book is its detailed explanation of the death penalty procedure in Virginia, which is second only to Texas in its number of executions. Since Washington's case is not well known, the book may not attract the general reader, but it is well worth a place in larger crime collections.--Frances Sandiford, formerly with Green Haven Correctional Facility Lib., Stormville, NY
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Death row conversions." Library Journal, Aug. 2003, p. 107. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A107121657/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f2034541. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A107121657
Edds, Margaret: WE FACE THE DAWN
Kirkus Reviews. (Jan. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Edds, Margaret WE FACE THE DAWN Univ. of Virginia (Adult Nonfiction) $29.95 2, 6 ISBN: 978-0-8139-4044-1
A thoughtful historical account of a legal campaign that formed one of the main pillars for Brown v. Board of Education.
In 1948, Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson, two African-American attorneys, mounted a signally important challenge to the notion of separate but supposedly equal education for black and white youth, a notion that "had to be unmasked as a fraud" and that was materially harmful to the children who labored under it. A federal judge in Virginia agreed with their contention to the extent that he ordered what amounted to desegregation, an order that school officials simply ignored. Underlying the legal challenge was a program mounted by the NAACP's lead lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, who would go on to be a Supreme Court justice. Marshall, notes retired journalist Edds (Finding Sara: A Daughter's Journey, 2010, etc.), "had tapped Robinson the previous winter to go county by county in Virginia investigating school inequalities and preparing lawsuits." A brilliant young attorney working with the older Hill, Robinson had gone about that work energetically, even as the Supreme Court made a key decision in 1949 to desegregate state universities in Texas and Oklahoma. Robinson and Hill's ongoing work in desegregating public schools in Virginia, by the author's account, provided a material basis for the decision five years later to overturn desegregation throughout the land. Edds paints a compelling portrait of the two men, badly overworked but committed, with Hill moving at ease in Richmond social circles while calmly refusing to be shut out. As a candidate for the state legislature, for example, he had sat with white voters and had a beer with them. In fact, writes the author, his "refusal to accept that he did not belong was perhaps even more groundbreaking than his candidacy." In this respect and many others, Hill and Robinson provide exemplary--and timely--models of citizenship.
A welcome contribution to the literature of the civil rights movement.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Edds, Margaret: WE FACE THE DAWN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A520735773/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d76906a0. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A520735773
Book review (nonfiction): ‘We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team That Dismantled Jim Crow’
By JAY STRAFFORD Special correspondent Feb 1, 2018
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The myriad heroes of the civil rights era fought, suffered and sometimes died for equality and justice.
Some — such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks — possess names recognized around the planet.
But many others played decisive roles, including two Richmond natives.
Margaret Edds explores their personal lives and public work in “We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team That Dismantled Jim Crow,” which recounts the indignities of life during segregation, offers an uplifting story of moral courage and includes a searing indictment of Virginia’s resistance to their efforts.
Hill was born in 1907 and graduated from Howard University and its law school; Robinson, born in 1916, was a product of Virginia Union University and Howard’s law school. Until 1942, when they joined forces in a law firm in Richmond’s Jackson Ward, they followed different paths.
Their partnership helped to transition America from a nation in which discrimination was codified to one in which equality advanced.
When students at woefully ramshackle, all-black R.R. Moton High School in Prince Edward County walked out in 1951, Hill and Robinson sued the county school board. That case was one of five consolidated into what became Brown v. Board of Education, in which the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated school segregation.
Although that victory etched their names in history, Hill and Robinson labored in the vineyards of righteousness before and after the celebrated decision, as Edds relates in this richly detailed dual biography.
Robinson later served on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and later as chief judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. On the latter, two of his colleagues were future Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as well as Robert H. Bork, a high court nominee whose confirmation was rejected. Robinson died in 1998.
In 1948, Hill won election to the Richmond City Council, the first African-American to serve on the panel since the 1890s. A Richmond and national icon, he lived to mark his 100th birthday before dying in 2007, having received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
But honors were not the goal. For the liner on his casket, Hill chose these words: “Let the Work I’ve Done Speak for Me.” Edds writes: “The work did — and does. Over decades, in countless courtrooms and with a power born of right conviction, it announced Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson to be among the best of their generation. Or any other.”
Edds, a retired journalist who lives in Richmond, pored over hundreds of previous books, articles and personal papers and conducted numerous interviews. Among those with whom she spoke were Ginsburg, former Govs. Linwood Holton and L. Douglas Wilder, U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, and her subjects’ surviving children, Oliver Hill Jr. and Nina Robinson Govan. The result is an exhaustive but never exhausting account to which Edds brings years of reportorial experience.
“The civil rights movement did not begin in the 1960s,” Edds writes. “Important parts of its foundation were laid in Virginia in the 1940s and 1950s by Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson. Their little-known story forms a missing link in the long and still-unfinished chain leading from American slavery to racial equality.”
With unobtrusive eloquence and reserved passion, Edds depicts an era during which much was accomplished and reminds us that much remains to be realized. Hill and Robinson, she writes, helped “to sound the death knell for Jim Crow segregation.”
She continues: “Time and circumstance are never static, however. The challenge they pose for this and future generations is to do the same, with equal fearlessness, in ours.”
Vivid and vital, “We Face the Dawn” lays out the lessons of the past, warns of the dangers of the present and illuminates the times of two stalwart men and the splendor of their achievements.
Jay Strafford is a retired writer and editor for The Times-Dispatch. Contact him at jstrafford@timesdispatch.com.
Book review: 'We Face the Dawn' recreates Roanoke in period between the wars
Reviewed By Michael L. Ramsey Mar 25, 2018 (0)
wefacethedawn 032518 ex p01
Courtesy University of Virginia Press
Courtesy University of Virginia Press
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MICHAEL L. RAMSEY is president emeritus of the Roanoke Public Library Foundation.
Oliver Hill grew up in Roanoke, studied law at Howard University, returned to Roanoke to practice law, and from Roanoke launched his campaign to rid the country of the Jim Crow laws that followed the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision — the official proclamation of “separate but equal.”
Hill studied law with Thurgood Marshall, the late Supreme Court justice, and met many influential leaders of the African-American community in Washington, D.C., and Virginia. He met his younger partner (also a Howard Law alumnus) Spottswood William Robinson III, when Hill began practicing law in Richmond.
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Together, Hill and Robinson would blaze a trail that would lead a generation out of the wilderness of segregated education and into a full-blown campaign for equal rights and access for all Americans. It was a long and sometimes arduous trip.
The Supreme Court decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, determined that segregated schools were inherently unequal — a repudiation of Plessy v. Ferguson. That case is the culmination of work in Virginia by Hill and Robinson, who were in the vanguard of the fight to provide equal education for African-American children — and equal pay for their teachers — through application of the law.
Margaret Edds has recreated the local, regional and national communities that gave rise to the powerful legal consortium that confronted and defeated the Jim Crow laws of the American South — a codified system that relegated African-Americans to second-class status.
Edds has also recreated Roanoke, Richmond and Washington beginning in post-World War I through the rest of the 20th century. It is the recreation of Roanoke during the period between the wars that will hold some appeal for local lovers of history. It is especially instructive for those who remember the supportive sense of community in black neighborhoods.
Edds’ extensive use of correspondence, contemporary newspaper accounts, memos and court documents brings the era of Oliver Hill to life. The reader is presented with vibrant portrayals of Roanoke, Richmond and Washington from the perspective of successful African-American entrepreneurs, lawyers and other professionals and their business, social and religious lives in a community of neighborhoods.
“We Face the Dawn” is a welcome addition to the story of how an oppressed segment of American citizens were able to build success for themselves and others. Edds recreates the neighborhoods whose loss was lamented in Dr. Mindy Thompson Fullilove’s “Root Shock” (which features Roanoke’s Gainsboro community) and a vibrant black middle class described in Elizabeth Dowling Taylor’s “The Original Black Elite” (which describes the powerful and successful black entrepreneurs who lived and thrived in the vicinity of Howard University).
The long reach of Oliver Hill’s influence is described by some of the Virginia leadership who were inspired by him, including former Gov. Douglas Wilder and former Gov. (and former Roanoker) Linwood Holton.
Spot Robinson was influential, as well, but in a different manner. He was a studious, meticulous lawyer who influenced many attorneys and judges (including colleagues who later served on the Supreme Court). He also served as chief judge on a federal court and on the tennis courts in Richmond. Those Richmond tennis courts also served black politicians who followed Robinson, including Gov. Wilder and former Richmond Mayor Henry Marsh and nonpolitician Arthur Ashe.
The detail-oriented Robinson and the gregarious self-assured Hill formed a good partnership and, working together, they led the national efforts to end racial discrimination. Edds has provided a readable account of that venture. She also poses questions in the epilogue about what our society should be doing to continue the work now and in the future:
“By helping to sound the death knell of Jim Crow segregation, Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson answered that question for their time. Time and circumstance are never static, however. The challenge they pose for this and future generations is to do the same, with equal freshness, in ours.”
'Finding Sara' tells family's story
Friday, July 30, 2010
By Karen Hall, Staff Writer
Margaret Edds' book, "Finding Sara -- A Daughter's Journey," tells the story of her mother.
A family with long-standing ties to Marshall County is now commemorated in a unique book documenting the short but interesting life of one of their members.
"Finding Sara -- A Daughter's Journey," by Margaret Edds, tells the story of her mother, Sara Edds, who died in 1950, when Margaret was just three years old.
Fortunately, family members were devoted to the written word, and Margaret found a treasure-trove of letters to and from Sara. Letters, diaries, interviews with surviving family members, and childhood memories of summer holidays spent with her grandfather in Delina, and her aunt Eleanor in Belvidere, enabled Margaret to write her mother's story.
She worked on the book for four years, and it was published in 2009.
"Who in their 60s would get to know their mother for the first time?" marveled Margaret. One reader remarked to her, "You know your mother better than I do mine."
The Barnes-Downing reunion is held every year in Lewisburg on the second Saturday in July, and Margaret always attends.
"I like being back in a place where I have such warm memories," she said. "I see it through the lens of memory." Margaret says she doesn't notice the changes in Lewisburg and the countryside -- "it seems sort of timeless to me."
Her aunts Virginia and Katherine each lived in Lewisburg at different times, and when she's here for the reunion, Margaret "drives by the houses we know."
There were about 24 people at this year's reunion, held at the Rec Center. Just two men, the Downing brothers Frank and Richard, remain from her mother's generation, but younger family members keep the tradition going.
Margaret Edds has been a journalist all her life, so she is well equipped to tell her mother's story. Explanatory narrative links the letters together to recount her life and link it to the history of the day.
Margaret's mother, Sara, was born at Hilltop View Farm, Delina, in 1915, the fourth of five children of John O. Barnes and Jennie May Downing Barnes. She was educated at the Delina School through 10th grade, Morgan School in Petersburg, Martin College in Pulaski, and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Sara graduated in 1940 with a bachelor's degree and a certificate to teach high school English, Latin, and math.
She only taught briefly, however, before leaving Tennessee to take a nine-month business secretarial course at Bowling Green College of Commerce in Kentucky.
Sara's first secretarial job was in Lynch, Ky., in those days a thriving coal-mining town, where she met Tom Edds. Barely a week later, he was inducted into the Army, and their courtship was conducted by letter.
Sara left her job in Lynch for higher pay at Oak Ridge in 1943, where scientists were racing to produce material to fuel the atom bomb. Sara and Tom were married in October 1943, but were separated almost immediately when Tom had to return to his Army post in Texas.
The two were living together in Texas when Margaret's older sister, Rachel, was born in 1945, but returned to Lynch when the war ended. Margaret was born there in 1947.
As Margaret read the letters, she realized she was coming close to the end of her mother's life. "On each reading of the letters," she writes, "my joy ebbed as the stack dwindled. With the diagnosis of Sara's acute rheumatic fever in June 1948, I felt gripped by an almost physical pain. Not only was Sara's story taking its final, dark turn, but the magic of recapturing her through letters had nearly run its course. Soon she would be leaving me again."
Sara and the two little girls were on a visit to her family in Delina when she died on Nov. 7, 1950.
Margaret and her sister survived the loss of their mother at such a young age -- they had a large and loving family, and a devoted father who never remarried. But Margaret now urges her readers to get to know their own mothers before it is to late.
"Get the letters out of the attic," she says. "Pay attention, try to learn, write things down for your children."
Free at Last: What Really Happened When Civil Rights Came to Southern Politics
Margaret Edds, Author Adler & Adler Publishers $18.95 (277p) ISBN 978-0-917561-37-5
In this thorough, well-written study, Virginian Pilot/Ledger Star reporter Edds shows how the 1965 Voting Rights Act has transformed the South, bringing more than 2300 blacks to elected office by 1985. Yet the effects of that lawwhich protects black voting rightshave been mixed, and social and economic barriers persist, she writes. Edds's several hundred interviews in Deep South states provide an array of striking stories of changes in the past two decades: from Atlanta's rise as a ""mecca'' of racial harmony under black mayors Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young, to rural Alabama's growing black leadership despite the continuing political dominance of whites. Blacks hold mainly lower-level posts but are destined to play an increasingly aggressive role in Southern politics, argues Edds. (June 24)
THE LIMITS OF POLITICAL POWER
By David J. Garrow May 31, 1987
FREE AT LAST What Really Happened When Civil Rights Came To Southern Politics By Margaret Edds Adler & Adler. 277 pp. $18.95
THE VOTING Rights Act of 1965 often has been praised as one of the most powerful and effective laws ever passed by the U.S. Congress. Its firm provisions ended most of the racial discrimination that long had kept hundreds of thousands of black American southerners off the voting rolls and outside the electoral process; in the first 10 years following its passage the number of registered southern black voters jumped from 1.9 million to approximately 4 million, and by 1986 the 11 southern states had some 3,510 black elected officials holding public office, compared to some 72 at the time that the Voting Rights Act became law.
A reporter for Norfolk's Virginia-Pilot/Ledger-Star newspapers, Margaret Edds spent the year 1985 traveling the South to talk with scores of those black officials and other political observers about the 20-year impact of the Voting Rights Act and the changes that have taken place in southern politics over the course of those two decades. Free at Last is an extremely readable and intelligently insightful product of those interviews and of other research, organized around the stories of particular southern black politicians -- Virginia Lieutenant Governor L. Douglas Wilder; Birmingham and Charlotte mayors Richard Arrington and Harvey Gantt; Greenwood, Miss., alderman David Jordan -- and the histories of significant cities and counties -- Atlanta; Richmond; Sunflower County, Mississippi; and Greene County, Alabama.
Edds' thorough and perceptive reporting focuses heavily on the question of just how much of a difference the election of those hundreds of black public officials has made in the lives of their often-needy black constituents. The answer, as she repeatedly makes clear, is that there has been less of a positive effect than many civil rights observers hoped for. As one Richmond activist told Edds, "Either they haven't lived up to expectations or we expected too much."
Edds correctly recognizes that excessive expectations are more of the explanation than is poor performance. To some degree, she notes, the limits on change, particularly in much of the rural Deep South, have stemmed from "the remarkable tenacity of whites in attempting to retain power." Even as of 1985 there remained 15 southern counties with a majority black population where the five-member county governing boards were all-white; in 23 additional black majority counties the governing boards contained four whites and only a single black.
Such counties generally receive far less national news media attention than do southern black political success stories from cities such as New Orleans, Atlanta, and Birmingham, or rural, black-ruled Alabama counties such as Greene, Macon and Lowndes. In both types of locales, however, Edds correctly explains, it is economic power and opportunities for access to economic resources, and not the skin color of local office-holders, that most significantly determines black citizens' living condition and life opportunities.
LOWNDES COUNTY Sheriff John Hulett, one of rural Alabama's best-known and longest-serving black elected officials, endorses Edds' view very firmly. "Until people become economically strong, political power alone won't do. For most people, it's like it was sixteen years ago," before Lowndes County had elected any black office-holders.
Hulett's point applies not only to depresed rural areas like Lowndes, however, but also to blacks' experience in the South's best-governed cities. Birmingham Mayor Richard Arrington, whom Edds calls "the model for individual success" among major black southern office-holders, also endorses Hulett's view -- "Asked what local blacks had to show economically for his tenure, Arrington replied: 'Quite frankly, we don't have very much.'"
Even in Atlanta, which Edds terms "the unofficial capital of American black politics," economic statistics reflect much the same picture. "Six percent of the city's black households had income of more than $35,000 in 1980, but a dispiriting 25 percent existed on less than $5,000." Randolph Kendall, Jr., executive director of the Richmond Urban League, explained to Edds what the class bifurcation reflected by figures like those has meant for southern blacks in real life terms: "Things have changed for people who have the resources and know-how to get around. Poor folks, they're still looking for a place to stay."
Hence Edds's evaluation of racial and political change in the South since the Voting Rights Act is necessarily mixed. She justifiably celebrates the triumphs of officials such as Wilder, Arrington and Gantt, and concludes that "by the standards of 1965, a region and its people had been transformed." However, Edds also emphasizes "the limits of that act in changing social traditions and long-standing economic patterns" and "how ineffective politics had been at removing economic shackles." No law, she bluntly concludes, "could . . . make political power the major determinant in shaping the quality of life" for southern blacks or any other Americans; in the South as elsewhere the real integration and equalization of American life will require economic changes more far-reaching than the political transformation that the Voting Rights Act has brought to the southern electoral arena over the past 20 years. :: David J. Garrow is the author of "Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference," which this year received both the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Resisting Jim Crow
New Book Details the Hard-fought Legal Battles
of Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson
by Jackie Kruszewski
VIRGINIA LAWYER | April 2018 | Vol. 66
p. 54
In late April of 1951, lawyers Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson were headed to Pulaski, Virginia, for a meeting about a case in the county. They had drafted papers asking the court to enroll black youth in the local white schools — the black high school having failed to approach any standard of equal mandated by Plessy v. Ferguson. But they still struggled to find black students and parents willing to take on the dangerous burden of putting their names to suits.
“I forgot to tell you,” Robinson later remembered telling another member of the travel party. “On our way to Pulaski we’ve got to stop for about half an hour or so and take care of a little matter up in Farmville.”
A group of students there had walked out of their dilapidated and abysmally-equipped high school and refused to return until a new school was built. They had written Hill and Robinson in Richmond of their predicament. The passion and resolve of the students impressed the legal team from the NAACP. But Hill and Robinson informed the students that their goal was no longer equality of the segregated schools; it was de-segregation, a controversial tactic for everyone involved. Were the students on board?
Author Margaret Edds tells this story and many like it in her new book, We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team that Dismantled Jim Crow. The February release from University of Virginia Press is a legal thriller of the nonfiction variety — a years-long story of the concerted, coordinated, meticulous effort to change the racial laws that oppressed black communities across the South.
Robinson and Hill headed that front in Virginia, and Edds writes a thorough, compelling profile of the courage and diligence of the two men and their associates. And, in a time when the outcomes of the civil rights movement are roundly celebrated, she reminds readers of the challenges and dangers the men faced every step of the way — burning crosses left on their yards and death threats, yes, but also the human stresses of leadership and administrative challenges from a white power structure stacked against them. Edds notes that, while Virginia opponents to integration did not engage as much in physical violence against civil rights leaders as their counterparts to the south did, they “specialized in breaking spirits” through firing, ostracizing, and the denial of credit, housing and jobs. In 1959, for example, the Virginia State Bar initiated disbarment proceedings over old cases of another lead NAACP attorney, and in the early 1960s, the General Assembly passed new lawyer ethics laws aimed squarely at NAACP lawyers. The bar followed up and initiated disciplinary proceedings against those leading the charge for integration.
A month after that meeting with the Farmville students, Robinson walked to the federal courthouse in Richmond to file Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County on behalf of 74 parents representing an astonishing quarter of the student body at Robert R. Moton High School. That case would become one of five later combined into Brown v. Board of Education, which overturned racial segregation in public schools in 1954. Robinson made the first argument on behalf of the plaintiffs at the Supreme Court.
Oliver Hill, Edds writes, was gregarious, unflappable, and demanding — an alpha male unperturbed by the dangers of his pursuits. Better known than Robinson due to his political career — he was the first black person elected to Richmond City Council since Reconstruction in 1949 — Hill graduated from Howard University Law School in 1933. Along with Thurgood Marshall, he became part of the first class graduated under a new curriculum designed by Vice Dean Charles Hamilton Houston, who sent his graduates out into the world with a plan to challenge Plessy and Jim Crow laws through the courts.
Spottswood Robinson III was among them, too, graduating in 1939 at the top of his class. Studious, brilliant, and thoughtful, Robinson was the quieter of the two. He brought a methodical, patient detail to his legal briefs, Edds says, once writing an appellate brief with 676 footnotes. He was a perfectionist and scrupulously honest. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who later served with Robinson on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, once said, “Few judges I have ever known were as unaffected by their lofty position, and no judge I have encountered was more meticulous.”
Edds speculates about the source of Robinson’ exactitude, which was clearly part of his nature. “But I’ve also wondered if it reflected a legal career spent facing down a white power structure,” she tells the audience at a February book release at the Library of Virginia. “One small slip, one inadvertent omission and that could doom his cause on any given day.”
She uses an anecdote from one of Robinson’s clerks — the judge refusing to jaywalk on a nighttime, deserted street in D.C. — as a charming example of his scrupulous honesty. “He had spent his career as a litigator, persuading dissenting segregationists that they had to obey the law, whether they liked it or not and whether it was convenient or not,” Edds says. “No man, in Robinson’s opinion, including himself, was above the law.” The perfectionism was not without personal cost. From recently released papers of the NAACP Legal Defense Funds, Edds discovered the quiet efforts of Robinson’s colleagues in 1953, collecting $968 in donations to cover the lawyer’s physician-ordered convalescence following Brown arguments. “All of us have been very worried about Spottswood’s health,” Thurgood Marshall wrote in one of the appeals. “[Robinson] was under terrific pressure and he was in a horrible state insofar as his health was concerned. The situation was so bad that we were afraid he would collapse at any moment. We cannot allow him to just kill himself.”
As a judge, Robinson receded from public life and gave few interviews, but Hill became, in effect, the face and soul of the civil rights movement in Virginia. Edds compares him to Nelson Mandela in passion, pragmatism, generosity of spirit, and depth of character. He had an “unwavering moral correctness” that propelled him through his life.
Hill showed up at candidate forums and meetings he wasn’t invited to, refusing to accept that he wasn’t welcome within the white power structure. He casually ignored signs that directed him to use certain train cars, elevators and seats. And he dismissed the men who burned a cross in his yard as “our local nitwits,” calling the fire department, rather than the police. His election to City Council was unusual for the era of at-large bodies, and gained him a measure of national notoriety.
The disparate personalities of these two men may have helped cement their successes in the 1950s as a legal team. The ’60s saw their paths diverge — Hill’s toward the ballot box and political organizing and Robinson’s toward academia and the bench. But Edds’ story gives life to that vital, heady era when they led a legal charge toward equality.
Edds spent six and a half years working on We Face the Dawn — her fifth book — combing archives, newspapers, recently released letters from the NAACP and interviewing surviving family and friends. Driven by the need to understand “Who were these men?” she says, the resulting book masterfully weaves together the legal battles with personal struggles and character sketches.
Edds, a daily newspaper journalist for more than 30 years, as well as an editorial writer and columnist, doesn’t shy from comparing Hill and Robinson’s fight to those of current political times, challenging readers to follow their lead.
“We are living in such discouraging times politically,” she tells the audience at the Library of Virginia. “But I look at these men and I think, there is nothing we are facing that is any more difficult than what they faced.”
They advanced the cause, Edds says, and created a legal basis for change.
“[Hill] asks, how can we keep the change moving in a way that is beneficial to humanity, rather than just try to hold on to what we have and enjoy that at the expense of everybody else? Our society seems temporarily to have lost sight of that question.”
[caption] Author Margaret Edds (shown above) speaks about her book at the Library of Virgina on February 8. Edds signs copies of her book, We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team that Dismantled Jim Crow, published February 2018 by University of Virginia Press.