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

DATE: SUNDAY, October 22, 1995                   TAG: 9510210006
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: G-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE: FLOYD                                LENGTH: Medium

DAISY PENN

Sitting in the living room of her Floyd County home, Daisy Penn unfolds a yellowed newspaper clipping retrieved from a small keepsake box. It recalls the day in June 1960 when she became the first black to graduate from Floyd High School.

Next to her smiling face on the page, the headline reports she is the second black to graduate from an integrated high school in Virginia, the first in Southwest Virginia.

"I'm 53 but I remember it," Penn says. "Going to court, the reporters, busing all the way to Christiansburg Institute when we had a school right here."

The first day Penn and the other black students entered the doors of Floyd High School they rode in on a separate bus. "I do remember there wasn't too much talking" Penn says. "We were all a little shook up."

"Not Even Cat Calls Broke Floyd Silence" reads the headline of a reporter's account of that first day.

"There was lots of name calling," Penn says. "I just ignored it. I remember words like 'nigger' and 'coon' but there were no physical fights."

Penn like the other students, both white and black, wasn't sure what to expect but "Everything went well compared to what I saw on TV, heard about, read about."

Penn remembers after a few weeks the name calling "slowed up."

"It was unfair that we had to go to court to go to school in our town," said Penn, who has worked at the local Skyline Sewing Factory for the past 26 years. Her son, who works at Bell Atlantic and lives in Radford, "couldn't believe we had to go through all of that. I think he has more white friends than black, things have really changed."

Penn echoes the others when she says "I'd go through it again if I had to."

"It's worth fighting for, some people have even lost their lives over it," Penn says.

Penn didn't have a shot at prom queen, but after graduation she won fourth place in a Miss White Plains beauty pageant in New York. An old newspaper clip shows the one dark face smiling among paler women in evening gowns.

Being the first black to graduate from an integrated high school in Southwest Virginia is an accomplishment Penn does not take lightly. "I feel proud still," Penn says. "I was doing something to help myself and to help the others who would come along later."

by CNB