Falls Church Residents Recall Days of Segregation

Hilda Hicks moved to Falls Church in 1941 as a new bride. Her late husband, Garland Hicks, was a school bus driver employed by Fairfax County, ferrying neighborhood students to and from the only black high school in Manassas. When the Hicks’ had children, they attended James Lee School, which was heated by a potbelly stove. Teachers kept the heat going and made soup for students to keep them warm.

The couple went grocery shopping in the predominantly black Georgetown, as Falls Church did not have an African American grocery store, but they could buy everyday ware like eggs and milk from a local white family.

“We couldn’t live where we wanted,” said Hicks, now 88-years-old. “If you had money to buy a house you could not buy a house in Falls Church.”

Hicks shared her story Saturday at the James Lee Community Center in Falls Church as part of Lost and Found Stories: African Americans in Northern Virginia, a George Mason University project which seeks to preserve community memories. The event was open to the public and featured the stories of people who lived in the region during segregation.

Hicks said life was not peaches and cream. The [Ku Klux] Klan was active and the color bar was strictly enforced. Government officials even moved the county line to lock African American homeowners out of the city. She recalled the good times too. There were house parties she said and the African American Methodist and Baptist churches organized joint trips to Carson Sparrow beach in Maryland for rides and games.

In the 50s her husband became the first president of Citizen’s Association, a group that met to get ideas on how to make Falls Church a better place. Garland Hicks headed the local Boy Scout troop and coached a baseball team. Hicks said her husband integrated the team around 1959 when a white doctor’s son asked to join the African American boys.

“He said ‘Come on and play. If you can play baseball come on in,’ ” she recalled.

Elizabeth Hudson Hall, another Falls Church resident, was not so lucky. As a youngster, Hall, now 80-years-old, wanted to become a Girl Scout but the only white troop in her area refused to have her. When her mother found out, she took counseling courses, became a den mother and started a troop with 20 other girls. Hall said the Girl Scouts went camping with their gear packed in suitcases.

Hall recalled her mother, Viola Pearson Hudson, had to fight for everything. At 12-years-old, Hudson wrote local government officials over the unfair living conditions in the African American section of Falls Church and became an activist from that age forward. The black ward had no indoor plumbing, no street lights and black families had to go to the post office to collect their mail while it was delivered to white families.

“We were almost in a primitive era and it shouldn’t have been that way,” Hall said.

Apart from picketing and writing government officials, black families found other ways to work the system in their favor. After finishing seventh grade at the black school, Hall wanted to be a doctor. The Manassas Industrial School for Colored Youth, her designated high school, only offered trades courses like carpentry, brick laying and sewing so the Hudson family used Hall’s godmother’s Georgetown address to enroll her into a high school in the District of Columbia. Most families did the same and Hall, like her friends, went home on weekends.

“You had no choice,” she said. “If you wanted to go to senior high school to get to college you had to do it.”

A half a century later, Hall says she is bewildered that young people are not taking advantage of the opportunities she and her friends didn’t have. She says she has seen very vast changes in Falls Church. Hicks agreed that the area has changed.

“I remember when I moved here, there was a guy who rode a horse and wagon down everywhere in the city,” Hicks said. “If he drove that horse and wagon down Broad Street today….”