Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, May 30, 1994                   TAG: 9405300094
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B3   EDITION: HOLIDAY 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: RUSTBURG                                LENGTH: Medium

MONUMENT FALLS VICTIM TO APPARENT RACIST STREAK

The black graduates of the county's segregation era high schools, including those who attended Campbell County High School, put up the monument on June 19, 1993.

Since then, it's been knocked over and repaired six times, beginning in October. The marker was pushed to the ground a seventh time recently and hit repeatedly with a heavy object. The former students who proudly erected it say they are angry enough to leave it down - for a while, anyway - as a silent witness to echoes of racism.

Virginia Abbott, who helped put up the monument, said she hopes leaving it on the ground for a while will break the cycle of vandalism. "Maybe someone will say, `Ha! We won. It stayed down,' " she said.

Elaine Preston, who attended the segregated high school, said the continuing vandalism is simply, "a pure racist act."

Campbell County Sheriff's Capt. Mike Harris said police are still investigating the vandalism but don't know who is responsible.

The marker is one of the few visible symbols of the old high school. Most of the buildings are gone, and the school's records and sports trophies vanished when segregation ended.

Graduates say the marker is a reminder - to them, their children and everyone who sees it - of the school which was both a symbol of segregation and a starting point for generations of black citizens.

The monument "is for our black children," Preston says. "This was our heritage. This is our heritage."

In 1949, a group of blacks bought the land for the Campbell County Training School, which opened in 1951. It was renamed Campbell County High School in 1952. Campbell County schools were integrated in 1969.

In 1991, black graduates of the county high schools from 1927 to 1969 held an all-class reunion, and the idea for the monument was born.

Abbott said there were some misgivings among the graduates about the monument, but others believed the county was "past the age and stage of hate."

Preston said she hopes the monument will last even as the last remnants of the school fade away.

"The young people coming on now, they probably associate that [site] as just Rustburg High," she said. "This is one of the ways we can show, `Hey, this is ours.' "