Articles

Civil Rights Veteran | By Shirley Bolinaga, Virginia - Pilot Staff Writer
Virginia-Pilot, 16 February, 1969

Norfolk.

With most of the civil rightists early causes won in Congress-from integrated schools to open housing-civil rights targets now are basically educational.

Part of the educational work must be directed to change attitudes and feelings which can't be legislated, and part to upgrading the education of Negro ghetto children.

That's the view of Mrs. Vivian C. Mason, who has been in the front lines of civil rights since her school days 50 years ago. A native of Auburn , New York , where Negroes were few, Mrs. Mason felt compelled to protest when a White history teacher told his class that slavery was not all bad and many white masters were kind to their slaves.

She responded by quoting from Booker T. Washington's just-published, “Up From Slavery.” Washington said he had never seen a former slave who wanted to return to bondage. The next day she brought the book for the teacher to read. He recanted. And that was one of her earliest forays into changing white attitude through education.

Vivian Mason's father, a Methodist minister, and mother, a music teacher, taught their four children never to accept segregation.

She recalls their own small-scale sit-in which integrated Auburn 's movie theater, at least for them. They brought tickets and were directed to the balcony. Ignoring the directions and a threat to call the police (“We had been taught never to fear the police-they were our friends”), they sat downstairs. No one called the police, but an usher told them as they left, “Don't come back.” They did go back and sit where they wanted.

“I think now we have a better understanding that people have a right to go where they have money to go and where and they education commits them to go,” Mrs. Mason said, trying to explain the difference in white attitude, as she sees it, then and now.

“We have a greater understanding of what constitutes human rights. Times have changed. White people did not know then about the theater, but now people know and these things are just as repellent, we hope, to white people as to Negro people.”

Her refusal to accept segregation extends to the black separatists of her own race, who seek separate Negro communities. “We never had a direct confrontation with the separatists. We only know what people have told us. I understand there is a small but active group here advocating it among young people. But I think this is the philosophy of a minority group. Its very difficult to see how anyone of any experience could adopt such a step and believe it would be best for the Negro people.”

Since her school days, she has continued to work for civil rights through education and a refusal to accept segregation.

The first is manifest in her work with the Norfolk Committee for Improvement of Education (NCIE). Its educational efforts have been directed not only at improving education in the schools, but also at white attitudes. Seminars on Negro history, efforts to get Negro history taught in the city schools, have been part of its work. Next weekend, the NCIE will sponsor a seminar strictly for youth, directed particularly at high school students.

Negro history is being integrated into the curriculum of the city schools. “You must recognize that people are becoming more and more intelligent,” she said. ‘Emotions are not so violent. Young people are coming up. I wouldn't say that Negro history is in the public school system at all, but a good beginning has been made.”

The NCIE's next project will be a concerted effort to get the Bereitter-Engleman Method of teaching disadvantaged children into the local schools. “We understand this has produced phenomenal results in teaching ghetto children,” she said.

“Of course this business of teaching children has so many facets to it that perhaps no one facet can claim to be the best and last work. But when we see so many children unprepared for life, we must question the education that ahs produced them up to this time. The schools have a capacity unparalleled by anything else for developing children.”

Mrs. Mason's civil rights work-she also organized the women's interracial council that was a forerunner of the biracial Human Rights Council-have helped satisfy the ambition that made her major in administration and political science at the University of Chicago . “I had hope to be an executive,” she recalls, though she never decided what kind of executive. She went on to graduate work in psychiatry at Fordham and physiology and psychology at Hunter, and married William T. Mason, a native of Trinidad , B.W. I.., whom she met at the University of Chicago . They have one son, W.T. Mason Jr., an attorney for the Justice Department.