The country celebrates Juneteenth this week—a holiday that marks the end of slavery after the Civil War. The Calfee Community and Cultural C
Quilt for the 23/54 project. 23 of the squares represent the families who signed a lawsuit against the Pulaski County School Board in 1947 for better educational opportunities for 54 Black children.
Jacob Robinson grew up in Galax, and his grandmother traveled by bus to attend the Wytheville Training School, one of a handful of Black schools across Southwest Virginia. “There was a huge emphasis on the institution of education for Black community members here,” Robinson said. Schools like the Wytheville Training School and the Calfee Training School in Pulaski were built in the 1800s and stayed open until schools integrated. “A lot of folks don’t know, but Black folks in this region were highly educated during that time, especially in relation to other parts of Virginia,” Robinson said. Robinson is a researcher at Virginia Tech and is part of a team called Monuments Across Appalachian Virginia. They’re collaborating with nine community groups to reclaim untold and overlooked history. One of those groups is the Calfee Community and Cultural Center, the organization that now calls the former Calfee Training Center home.
Robinson said, once Pulaski County integrated in 1967, many of the Black teachers who had taught at Calfee left (because they weren’t offered equal opportunities at the integrated school). One who stayed was Dorothy DeBerry Venable, a Black coal miner’s daughter, who taught for 46 years. “In order to reach the students, you’ve got to get down to their level. I loved every minute of it,” Venable said in an oral history interview the Calfee Center is working on. “We had fun.” Before integration, Venable taught second grade at Calfee for fifteen years. When she discovered her students were learning from older textbooks than what students at the white school had, she complained to the school board. “Later on that day, this van from the school board office pulled up in front of the school,” Venable said. “And guess who got new books? Me. I had been taught by my father that if something’s not right, you complain.”
During the ceremony, Calfee Center’s executive director, Jill Williams, said heroes like Venable, are important to celebrate. “Without those stories, stories that are relatable, and rooted in community, how do we inspire the next generation of leaders? How do we build a better future?” Williams said. “We are living in a time when there is real pressure to whitewash our nation’s history. Especially the painful parts about slavery, segregation and oppression,” Williams said. “And while I understand the impulse to shield children from pain, the danger is this: when we don’t teach the hard history, we also don’t get to teach about the everyday heroes who resisted.”