page_title: Petersburg, Virginia
section_title: Civil Rights Movement
hierarchical_section_title: Petersburg, Virginia / History / Civil Rights Movement
caption_attribution_description: English: City Market at Petersburg, Virginia This is an image of a place or building that is listed on the National Register of Historic Places in the United States of America. Its reference number is 69000345
context_page_description: Petersburg is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States. As of the 2010 census, the population was 32,420. The Bureau of Economic Analysis combines Petersburg with Dinwiddie County for statistical purposes. It is located on the Appomattox River. The city is just 21 miles south of the historic commonwealth capital city of Richmond. The city's unique industrial past and its location as a transportation hub combined to create wealth for Virginia and the Middle Atlantic and Upper South regions of the nation.
  Early in the colonial era of the 18th century, Petersburg was the final destination on the Upper Appomattox Canal Navigation System because of its location on the Appomattox River with its connection to the James River to the east at the Atlantic Seaboard fall line and the tying in with the James River shipping traffic was a strategic place for transportation and commercial activities. It connected commerce as far inland as Farmville, Virginia at the foothills of the Blue Ridge and the Appalachian Mountains chain, to shipping further east into the Chesapeake Bay and North Atlantic Ocean.
context_section_description: Major black churches, such as First Baptist and Gillfield Baptist, formed the moral center of the Civil Rights Movement in Petersburg, which gained strength in mid-century and was a center of action. Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker, the pastor of Gillfield Baptist Church, had become friends with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the early 1950s when they were both in divinity school in New York state.  In 1957 they co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an important force for leadership of the movement in the South.  Walker also founded the Petersburg Improvement Association (PIA), modeled on the Montgomery Improvement Association in Alabama.  According to Walker and other close associates of King, Petersburg had played an important role, a kind of blueprint for the national civil rights movement.
  Beginning in the 1950s African Americans in Petersburg struggled to desegregate public schools and facilities. In 1958 the City Council closed Wilcox Lake, a popular swimming hole in Petersburg to prevent the lake's public recreational area from being racially integrated.  It never re-opened to swimming. Through sit-ins in the bus terminal in 1960, the PIA gained agreement by the president of the Bus Terminal Restaurants to desegregate lunch counters in Petersburg and several other cities.
  Virginia officials strongly opposed school integration following the 1954 US Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools were unconstitutional. They initiated the program of Massive Resistance.  For instance, rather than allow schools to be integrated, then Governor of Virginia, J. Lindsay Almond ordered the schools in several localities including Warren County, Charlottesville and Norfolk, to be closed.  The school board of Prince Edward County closed the public schools for five years, starting in 1959.  In Petersburg, the Bollingbook School opened in 1958 as a segregation academy for white students.
caption: The city market that has been preserved and is still used as a market.
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