Exhibit sheds light on struggle for racial equality

By Denise M. Watson The Virginian-Pilot November 26, 2012

Paula Martin Smith attended a conference on aging this summer simply to get information. Yet the retired teacher made a discovery that took her back to her childhood and a painful era in Virginia's history.

Smith, who lives in Danville, stopped at a table set up by AARP and picked up a booklet describing a statewide traveling exhibit about the desegregation of Virginia's public schools.

Smith turned to a page and saw a photo of herself as a smiling 10-year-old. Smith was unknowingly, but appropriately, the poster child for the exhibit.

"I knew it was me, and I knew when it was taken," Smith said.

Soon others would, too.

Smith's story of growing up in segregated Danville in the 1950s and '60s would join others that the exhibit, "School Desegregation: Learn, Preserve and Empower," aims to capture as it travels around the state.

The exhibit is a collaboration between AARP Virginia, the Virginia State Conference NAACP, the Urban League of Hampton Roads and DOVE - the Desegregation of Virginia Education project.

DOVE started in 2008 after state researchers, archivists and historians saw the need to collect and catalog primary resources that centered on desegregation, primarily from the 1940s to the 1980s.

The project began as a way to track and to collect newspaper clippings, yearbooks and other papers from an era that often gets overlooked in Virginia history, said Sonia Yaco, one of DOVE's founders and the university special collections librarian and university archivist at Old Dominion University.

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Exhibit sheds light on struggle for racial equality