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

DATE: SUNDAY, October 22, 1995                   TAG: 9510210001
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: G-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

BONNIE STUART BECKETT

Bonnie Stuart's senior portrait smiles in the Check yearbook among the rest of the graduating class in 1961. The caption under her name: "The smile that is always there."

"I smiled to keep from crying," says Bonnie Stuart Beckett, now 52. "I couldn't let them know how bad I was hurting or how frightened I was so I just kept smiling. Sometimes as soon as I hit the door of my house after school I just let loose and cried."

Sandra Prillaman, who taught English and French at Check High School in 1960, described integration in Floyd County as "calm, but looking back upon it, it must have been much more difficult for those four students to move into a sea of white faces than it was for anybody else."

Beckett remembers that January morning when she walked through the doors of Check. "We met with the principal and he told us that we were outnumbered - to let him handle any incidents. He told us that if we were confronted, not to fight back, just bring it to him and he'd handle it."

The principal, J. Harold Anderson, apparently made good on his promise.

She tells of a day she filed into class before the teacher arrived. "Some of the boys were in a crowd in the middle of the classroom," Beckett says. "When I walked in, they threw a wooden bookend from the crowd and it hit me on the leg and cut me."

Beckett went to the principal. "He sent for each one of those boys and they wouldn't tell [who threw the bookend]." So the principal sent them all behind the school with shovels. They were to dig a hole until someone confessed. "Finally they got tired and somebody told."

Her grandmother supported her throughout the adjustment. "Just keep your chin up, keep going and trust in God," is what Beckett remembers her grandmother saying. Beckett's mother had died four years before the integration, and her dad had remarried and moved away, leaving her to live with her grandmother. "I think she's the reason I stuck it out."

In the 1961 yearbook's Senior Horoscope, Bonnie Stuart is predicted to be married with two children 10 years later. Close.

Beckett, currently employed at a pension administration company in Fairfax, Va., is married with two boys and two girls. Her oldest daughter, Lisa Hill, is a track star who has made it to Olympic trials twice.

Beckett thinks her children never realized how different things were for her and what a difference integration made. "I guess you don't realize unless you go through it " Beckett says.

Beckett didn't always feel alienated as she adjusted to her surroundings. Thanks to "special people" like the younger white student, James Richards. "He would always watch me but stayed a safe distance behind," says Beckett. "I never knew whether he was a friend or enemy but he was always there and sometimes when I was feeling really bad, I'd look around and he'd be there smiling at me."

"I think he was one who wanted to be friendly, but was afraid of how the others would take it," Beckett says. "I felt like if I had ever needed him he would have come to my aid."

Sometimes the eyes Beckett felt on her weren't so comforting. "I was always aware that somebody was watching, watching the regular things you did," says Beckett. "I think sometimes to see if we were human." Beckett remembers walking down the hall, how other students would move to the sides and clear the way.

That first year the county refused to provide a school bus for the four students at Check. Since her grandmother didn't have a car, "We had to go around and ask people to take us to school" says Beckett. Both she and her cousin Helen Stuart Smith remember the days they had no ride and had to walk home warily along the county road. "The bus with the white students would pass us and the kids would throw things out the window and make noises," Beckett says. "After it passed we got back on the road, it was very painful."

Beckett looks back to the early '60s in Floyd. "It was so unfortunate, I think many were taught that we were really different, not that our skin was a different color but that we were just not like them," she says. "That was the first chance they got to see that we were the same."

by CNB