Two Brave Men Honored as Civil Rights Stalwarts
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By Emma Boyce
ames Smith still recalls the afternoon, nearly sixty years ago, when he walked into Bradfield’s drug store on West Washington Street.
He was just a young man then. Inside the store, he moved to find an attendant, stepping briefly on a small, black square painted on the floor. A woman stopped him and pointed to the ground: African-Americans weren’t permitted beyond the square. “The woman said to me, you have to stand in this black square,” said Smith, now retired and in his 80s. “I told her no, I’m not standing on this square. I’m out of here and I left and I never went back.” Too many of these shameful stories marked the struggle for equal rights. Like many of his contemporaries, Smith knows them all too well. In 1961, not long after that incident, Lena Washington and William Jackson, head of the Loudoun chapter of the NAACP, asked Smith and three other young African-Americans, including Roger Dodson, Clarence Grayson, and Smith’s longtime neighbor, Reverend William Swann, to stage a sit-in at the lunch counters of three establishments in Middleburg. Several others had already refused, but Dodson, Grayson, Smith and Swann agreed. Their decision was instrumental in desegregating Middleburg. “I knew it was going to be risky because it was scary times back then,” said Smith. “But these things had to happen. Somebody had to do it and we went on and did it.” Each establishment, including Halle Flournoy’s Middleburg Pharmacy on Madison St., had refused to take their orders. As instructed by Jackson, the group left peacefully. A few weeks later, Jackson contacted the men for a second sit-in. President John F. Kennedy, then renting a country house, Glen-Ora, just outside Middleburg, was coming to town. This time, they would stay until they were served or cuffed. “We were willing to get arrested and do what we had to do,” Smith said. “We had to take a chance at it.” The NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had planned to send busloads of civil rights activists to Middleburg. According to local historian Eugene Scheel, Father Albert Pereira, the celebrant at the Middleburg Community Center where the Kennedys attended Catholic mass, met with town officials and restaurant owners in hopes of de-fusing the situation.
Photo by Emma Boyce
James Smith
Photo by Emma Boyce
Photo by Emma Boyce
The Sona Bank, next to the Safeway, was once Bradfield’s drug store on West Washington Street.
This building on South Madison Street was once the Middleburg Pharmacy.
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Go Green Middleburg | Spring 2020
