Beach Schools Employee Witnessed Desegregation

By Lauren Roth, The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, Va.

Jan. 14–VIRGINIA BEACH — Years before the schools integrated, Cora Goodman went to work as a custodian at the all-white Thoroughgood Elementary School in Princess Anne County.

In June, she will retire from the school, after 48 years and eight principals. No other Virginia Beach school employee has serv ed as long.

She remembers impudent students set straight with a paddle, hallway and restroom patrols up to six times an hour after the first black students enrolled, and the stand she took for classified employee retirement benefits.

In 1974, a longtime bus driver left to take care of an ill husband. Goodman was incensed to learn that the bus driver would not have retirement benefits. At the time, drivers, custodians and cafeteria workers were not eligible.

Goodman wrote a letter to a school official demanding equal treatment.

“No teachers were going to stay and clean their classrooms, or come back to the cafeteria and make hot lunch, or polish off their car and take the kids home,” she said last week.

That fall, the workers got benefits.

And after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Goodman was among the legions who fanned out nationwide to register other black adults to vote. After a day’s work sweeping and waxing floors, she donned boots and carried a light to knock on doors along the dark, unpaved lanes where black families lived.

Although she is preparing for retirement, Goodman hasn’t slowed down. In five minutes, she emptied the trash for a hallway of 12 fourth- and fifth-grade classrooms, two restrooms and a teacher workroom storing a globe and a slack-jawed skeleton.

She also dodged questions about her age.

Head custodian Walter Dreuitt called Goodman “my right hand and my left hand, too. When you think of Thoroughgood, you think of Cora.”

— Reach Lauren Roth at (757) 222-5133 or lauren.roth@pilotonline.com.

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, Va.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

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