Lifting Every Voice: My Journey from Segregated Roanoke to the Corridors of Power

By William B. Robertson, Becky Hatcher Crabtree and Linwood Holton

Bill Robertson was one of our greatest pioneers and a tireless advocate for racial justice. One of his final acts was the completion of his memoirs. Lifting Every Voice reveals how the advances made during his lifetime were no foregone conclusion; without the passionate efforts of real people, our present could have been very different.

The survivor of a traumatic childhood in the Green Book South, and the witness to his father's rage over racial inequity, Robertson rose above an oppressive environment to find a place within the system and, against extreme odds, effect change. He was the first Black man to run for the Virginia General Assembly, and as a teacher, the first to help integrate a white school in Roanoke. He became the first Black decision-maker in any southern governor’s office, appointed by Virginia governor Linwood Holton in 1970. In a state controlled by segregationist Democrats, Holton was the first Republican governor since Reconstruction, and his government was pivotal in its commitment to move the state away from nearly a century of segregationist policies. Bill Robertson was an inner-circle member of this historic administration. His account of its challenges and hard-won victories tells us much about that critical era.

Robertson went on to serve five presidents, heading the Peace Corps office in Kenya and later serving as deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs. As a public servant he worked on both sides of the aisle, in a way almost inconceivable in today’s polarized society, collaborated with the Jaycees to build a camp for children with mental disabilities in Virginia, and eventually focused his support on Black Lives Matter in his eighties—because there is still so far to go.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Feb 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9780813947181

Book preview

Cover Page for Lifting Every Voice

Lifting Every Voice

Lifting Every Voice

My Journey from Segregated Roanoke to the Corridors of Power

William B. Robertson

WITH BECKY HATCHER CRABTREE

FOREWORD BY GOVERNOR LINWOOD HOLTON

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2022 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2022

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Robertson, William B., 1933–2021, author. | Crabtree, Becky, author. | Holton, A. Linwood (Abner Linwood), writer of foreword.

Title: Lifting every voice : my journey from segregated Roanoke to the corridors of power / William B. Robertson with Becky Hatcher Crabtree ; foreword by Governor Linwood Holton.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021035779 (print) | LCCN 2021035780 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813947174 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780813947181 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Robertson, William B., 1933–2021. | Holton, A. Linwood (Abner Linwood), 1923–—Friends and associates. | Virginia. Governor’s Office—Employees—Biography. | Peace Corps Kenya—Biography. | African American men—Biography. | African American educators—Biography.

Classification: LCC E185.97.R615 A3 2022 (print) | LCC E185.97.R615 (ebook) | DDC 975.5/044092 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021035779

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021035780

Cover photo: William B. Robertson on the steps of the Virginia State Capitol Building, 1971. (William B. Robertson Papers, Archives Collection, Bluefield State College)

For my children and grandchildren,

Bernice Victoria Robertson,

William Allen Robertson,

Eva Marie Robertson,

and

Teddy Robertson,

the joys of my life,

and

America,

my country,

the country I love so very much

Whenever I hear songs such as The Star-Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful or recite the Pledge of Allegiance, I get teary-eyed. These are symbols of what we want America to be. However, we must realize that as a nation, we have not achieved true equality for all our citizens. Recognizing our shortfall, let’s do something revolutionary. Let us join Colin Kaepernick and take a knee. Then, as one America, patriots all, let us rise and go to work eradicating bigotry, hatred and prejudice in our land. Let us unite America. To do less is simply ignoring reality.

—William B. Robertson, Baltimore Sun, September 7, 2017

Contents

Foreword

by Governor Linwood Holton

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 | Early Days

2 | Childhood: Mastering Home, School, and Community Climate

3 | World War II

4 | Jackie Robinson and My Dreams

5 | High School Days: Trials and Triumphs

6 | College and Beyond

7 | Johnnie Goes Back to School

8 | Jaycees and Apple Jelly

9 | A Faltering Step—An Inviting Door

10 | Unprecedented Entrance to the Virginia Governor’s Office

11 | Hostage Situation

12 | Celebration

13 | Hot Summer in Hill City

14 | Virginia State Penitentiary

Illustrations

15 | Haves vs. Have-Nots

16 | A Voice from the NAACP

17 | VPI-SU Consumer Affairs Office

18 | Balancing Time in Washington, D.C.

19 | Kenya

20 | People-to-People Programming

21 | State Department

22 | Goals in Africa

23 | Consulting and My First Love

24 | Back to School

25 | My Family

26 | The Sad Demise of Camp Virginia Jaycee

27 | Renaissance at Bluefield State College

28 | Call to Action

Appendix: Speeches, Interview, and Honors

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

On the evening of May 30, 1973, in my last year as governor of Virginia, my twelve-year-old son, Woody, parked his bike behind the governor’s mansion and ran up the ornate early nineteenth-century staircase to deliver startling news. While delivering Richmond’s evening newspaper—one in which I was regularly lambasted for my progressive views, especially on race relations—he had been attacked by several boys his age. They wanted money and he had none, so they gave him a few smacks before he could make it into an apartment building.

The boys, who were African American, lived in a poor neighborhood just off Woody’s paper route a few miles from Capitol Square. Although unhurt, he was rattled—and worried that they would come after him again, or perhaps accost one of the area’s numerous elderly residents. As governor I had unique recourse: several undercover police officers accompanied Woody on his rounds the next day. His assailants came after him again, took marked bills, and were detained and cited before being released to their parents.

But the cops were not the only ones who accompanied Woody that day. I had asked my special assistant for minority and consumer affairs, a former elementary school principal named Bill Robertson, to find out about these young men. As they were arrested, he was standing on the curb across the street, pretending to read a newspaper but actually observing closely. He followed up by visiting their homes, where he discovered the absolute squalor in which they and their families were forced to live.

When Bill reported back to me, he made the kind of proposal that showed what kind of person he was. Given these young men’s circumstances, he said, our duty was not to punish them but to give them the opportunity to come by some spending money by honest means. The result, as Bill describes in chapter 15 below, was Operation Self-Help. He invited Richmond business leaders to a luncheon where he and Woody persuaded them to donate to a summer jobs program for about one hundred underprivileged kids. Looking back from the perspective of half a century, I wish we had paid them more for the hard work they did, mostly cleaning up vacant lots, but they did get an opportunity they had not had before, and they owed it all to Bill Robertson. Newspapers all over the United States and Canada reported the story, focusing on Woody’s role in helping raise the funds. As was typical of Bill Robertson, he kept in the shadows, taking no credit for the project he had conceived and carried out.

As you will read in Lifting Every Voice, Operation Self-Help was only one of the many creative ways that Bill found to help others. As the first African American to serve in a professional capacity in the Virginia governor’s office, he faced an uphill battle every day, but he accomplished a great deal, with his two most powerful weapons being persistence and charm. The most important of his many successes came in knocking down barriers to African Americans seeking employment, both with private businesses and with the Commonwealth of Virginia. When he and I took office, not one of Virginia’s one thousand state troopers was African American—and the superintendent was in no hurry to make a change. But Bill stayed after him, and eventually the force was desegregated. He worked his magic in countless other agencies as well.

In December 1972, barely a year after the famous Attica prison riot in upstate New York, inmates in the Virginia State Penitentiary also took over part of their institution. Bill rushed to the scene and took the lead in negotiating a peaceful resolution. As you will read in chapter 14, he listened to the prisoners’ grievances—they really were enduring terrible conditions—and also the concerns of the overworked and underpaid guards. Bill tells you how he resolved the situation, but let me contrast his compassionate approach to that of my friend and fellow Republican Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York. In the Attica riot, thirty-three prisoners and ten corrections officers lost their lives. At the Virginia penitentiary, the death toll was zero.

When I brought Robertson to Richmond, he was already well known throughout our state—and among Jaycees nationwide—as the founder of Camp Virginia Jaycee, which served disabled kids. And his service continued for decades after my term as governor. He became the head of the Peace Corps for Kenya and later deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs. His boss for much of that period was Ronald Reagan. Bill never had any illusions about President Reagan, but he was the type of person who could get along with anyone who would enable him to serve others.

Robertson’s service continued to the end, into his ninth decade. In Baltimore, where he spent most of the year recently, he became a tireless advocate for the squeegee kids, who earn money at stoplights by cleaning motorists’ windshields. He recognized that they are just trying to earn an honest living, making them not so different from the Operation Self-Help kids.

I knew Bill for more than fifty years, yet I learned an immense amount from Lifting Every Voice. It is, to begin with, the extraordinary story of his growing up under segregation in the southwestern Virginia city of Roanoke, where my wife, Jinks, and I were raising our own children. Jinks and I both hailed from families that were able to send us to expensive colleges, and I found that what my city and state offered me was only as limited as my ambitions. But Bill saw his own father become increasingly embittered as more and more less-qualified White men were promoted over him. One of the Holton family’s favorite treats was visiting Roanoke’s amusement park, Lakeside, which for years barred its gates to black families like the Robertsons, as Bill’s family painfully recalls.

Years later, Bill and I discovered that we had known each other longer than either of us had realized. During my years as an attorney in Roanoke, my offices were in the Shenandoah Building in downtown Roanoke. Sometimes I would stop to chat with one of the cleaners, who often brought her son to work with her. That turned out to have been Bill and his mother, Rebecca Robertson.

As you read this book, you will no doubt be as heartbroken as I was to learn what my friend had to go through growing up African American in the Green Book South. But I suspect that even more, you will be moved by Bill’s fighting spirit. Early in life, he committed himself to fighting injustice, which of course meant constantly witnessing it up close and personal. But he decided that whatever he experienced, he would remain an optimist. He kept to that decision for more than eighty years.

As I initially wrote this in June 2020, many White Americans were belatedly discovering just how much more privilege and opportunity they have had than their African American brothers and sisters. For many Black participants in movements like Black Lives Matters, it has to be exasperating to see White folks take so long to learn so little, and I can certainly see why many give way to despair. I respect the pessimists; God knows the facts often seem to be on their side. But if I know anything about Bill, it is that his optimism, sometimes justified and sometimes maybe not, was his great strength.

You will read a host of amazing stories in Lifting Every Voice, but I think the book and Bill Robertson are both summed up in a single snapshot he provides from one of his countless visits to Camp Virginia Jaycee: he witnessed a blind camper pushing a paraplegic friend’s wheelchair, with the rider providing directions. A sad sight? Not to Bill. For him it was one more proof of how far we can go together.

LINWOOD HOLTON

Governor of Virginia, 1970–74

Acknowledgments

We wish to express heartfelt gratitude to our family members who have supported us and given us time to follow this dream, especially our extraordinary spouses, Ruth and Roger, who carried on without us and silently brought us plates of food when we were so immersed in this book that we didn’t take time to eat. We honor the persistence of Victoria Robertson, who would not let her father rest until he wrote down his story, a process that took more than forty years. We publicly thank the dozens of role models who guided us by word and deed during our lifetimes and those who educated us, our teachers, most especially those at Bluefield State College. We wrote this book in humble recognition of those who came before, on whose shoulders we stand.

Our book would not have been possible without a complex network of people and events. The generosity of Linwood and Woody Holton, standing as a testament of friendship over the years, sped our work on its way. Librarians and officials at Bluefield State College, James Leedy, Jim Nelson, and Nancy Adam-Turner, endured our questions and opened their doors for us to research and marvel at the school and its past. The dedicated librarians in the Virginia Room of the Roanoke City Library searched newspaper files with heaters at their feet in the cold. Nadine Zimmerli and the staff at the University of Virginia Press have been so very kind and patient with us as we learned the behind-the-scenes tasks of book publishing. Our countless friends, near and far, have contributed words and photos and made this book better. Special thanks are due to those who took the time to read and edit and make suggestions: Thelma Daley, sixteenth National President of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority; Sonja Garcia, fourteenth South Atlantic Regional Director and Chairman of the International Archives Committee at Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.; Tracy Hale Clark, sixty-fifth State President of the Virginia Jaycees; and Bill’s brothers in the Knights of Peter Claver in Tampa and Baltimore. We also appreciate the hospitality of the De Cheke family in Baltimore for providing us a comfortable place to talk and write. We are grateful for the peoples of the world, especially in the sixty-five countries served by Bill Robertson who taught him that humans are the same around the globe and that fathers and mothers worldwide want to make a living and hope their children can be safe, educated, and successful. The knowledge that we are part of the same humanity strengthens us all.

In addition, our work has been touched by the meticulous editing of Fran Allred and Mickey Johnson at We Edit Books, the ever-encouraging, knowledgeable Connie Taylor at Fathom Publishing Company, the wordsmithing skill of Lauren Trovato, and the magic of photographic artist Jacques Polomé at Jacques Polomé Design.

Finally, we recognize that behind all these gifts of love and friendship and skill is the Giver, the good Lord above. We give thanks to Him for smiling on our efforts.

---

These words, ordered and readied in the spring of 2020, were subject to the drastic lifestyle changes wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of being defined by this plague and the nationwide racial injustice such as that recently occurring in Minnesota, we must continue to come together, to become and remain brothers and sisters and conquer the cruelties of the world with our strength of unity.

---

Publisher’s note: William Bernard Robertson passed away on June 22, 2021, at the age of eighty-eight, while his book was in production. Although he saw his memoir through to its almost final form, we regret that he did not live to hold a copy of the bound book itself. We express our deep sadness at the loss of this extraordinary man. We also express our gratitude to Becky Hatcher Crabtree and Victoria Robertson for their dedication in seeing this book through to publication. May William B. Robertson’s story inspire us to ensure that every voice can be lifted to rejoice in equal liberty.

Lifting Every Voice

Introduction

My journey to be somebody started many years ago and took many paths. I well remember Mrs. Mattie Morris, my first-grade teacher at Gainsboro School, a segregated public school in Roanoke, Virginia, introducing Lift Every Voice and Sing to my classmates and me. It is a beautiful and powerful song that has served me well throughout the years.

My ancestors talk to me via the song. They provide guidance, direction, and inspiration. They highlight the fact that I should be proud of who I am and glory in what has been achieved by those who were kidnapped, stolen from their homes in Africa, and impressed into America’s evil, billion-dollar-plus institution of slavery. They and their descendants endured slavery, Jim Crow laws, and segregation, yet with God’s help, we played a major role in building this country. Through the lyrics of this song, we send a message to the foes of African Americans—raise your voices and sing this song together as American brothers and sisters. Join with us and sing together. Change is coming. It is inevitable. Either join our march to victory and let liberty and equality prevail or get out of the way.

There have been many significant stops along the way. One of the most consequential was the place I found myself on a steamy August morning in my eighty-sixth year. It was difficult for me to comprehend that day in 2019 that I was to be honored by the renaming of the library at Bluefield State College, a historically Black college, the school where I matriculated, matured, graduated, and learned to become a professional.

As I looked over the audience, I felt the electricity in the room. It was like a Sunday church service. The crowd was made up of well-dressed, finely groomed men in suits and shiny dress shoes, and fashionable women in high heels and a variety of dress styles and flowing pantsuits. They relaxed in the air-conditioned facility after finding their way around the terraced hills of Bluefield State and climbing up the slope in the heat to the library. Friends from long ago greeted one another and renewed the bonds of shared memories. Photographers kneeled before the podium with the long lenses of their digital cameras pointed at the speakers, poised to get the best shots in the crowded room.

I gripped the lectern, a comfortable position for me after a lifetime of public speaking, and began to speak as seventy years of my life unfolded before me. The parade of memories included the day I realized I didn’t have enough money to register for college; my efforts to earn two degrees; the conferring upon me of an honorary degree; and my association with five United States presidents, who sent me to sixty-five countries to represent the American people.

Men and women gathered in the library punctuated my short speech with applause and cheered me on with cries of Oh, yes and Praise God as I spoke of the virtues of libraries, but especially this one, rich with history. I saw the smiles, and mine matched theirs. To be in this place, this important place, now with my name on the door, was a joyful and gratifying experience.

This was happening to me, a man born and raised in segregated Roanoke, Virginia. I realized how good God had been to me. This special moment caused me to love and appreciate even more Bluefield State College, the life I had lived, and the country I had served.

Other important moments cascaded through my mind, clear as day. All of them changed my life and rerouted my destiny. Woven like a shimmering golden thread through the fabric of my life was divine intervention. Whether it was my first days of college; the kitchen of my childhood home with Mamma; dancing the night away with my wife at an awards presentation dinner; selling apple jelly; negotiating in the midst of a prison riot; acting on behalf of the governor of Virginia in a prison hostage situation; working from a variety of offices in Washington, D.C.; organizing volunteers in Nairobi, Kenya; planning my beloved Camp Virginia Jaycee; helping dismantle apartheid; or changing attitudes worldwide, I had also been changed. So many places and people had altered my path, but I was drawn to the place where I stood that day, the college whose library now bore my name.

Indeed, it was validation that I had become somebody.

1

Early Days

I was seventeen in 1950 on a hot August day when my father and I walked to the train station near our home in Roanoke for me to board the Powhatan Arrow, a sleek Norfolk & Western passenger train. I was on my way to southern West Virginia to enroll at Bluefield State College (BSC). My dad worked for the railroad so I had a free pass to ride the train. The rest of my life teetered precariously on the outcome of this trip.

I was excited but managed to listen to his last-minute advice: You will only need three shirts, one on your back, one in the drawer, and one at the cleaners. He told me that there were going to be students there who possessed more than I. Money and clothes are not important, he said. Your focus must be on doing well and graduating. My father had shown us all our lives that our attending college meant everything to him. He had gone to college, too, but he was from a family of twelve, and when he and Mamma married, he dropped out. He wanted his children to be part of the American dream of middle-class status and values, and he felt that education was the path to that dream.

There were a few other African Americans in the segregated train car. I swallowed the feeling of anxiety and pressed my forehead to the window to watch cornfields and the often-unseen back doors and backyards of little towns speed by. When I was calmer, I recalled an incident from years before when, early on a Sunday morning, I was delivering newspapers in Roanoke. I watched a busload of young men unload at a service station to get sodas and snacks. They looked like giants to me. I found out they were members of the Bluefield State College football team heading home after a 55–0 rout of St. Paul’s College in Lawrenceville, Virginia, the previous day. I thought I might want to go to Bluefield