I thought many of you would
find the below obituary of interest. He led a full life and certainly left his
stamp on Wheatley and therefore on us.
Neil Sullivan; Defied
Racist School Policy
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff
Writer
Wednesday, August 10, 2005;
Page B07
Neil V. Sullivan, 90, a
schools administrator who rose to national prominence for defying a Virginia
county's racist educational policies, died Aug. 6 at his home in Meredith, N.H.
He had congestive heart failure.
After the controversy in
south-central Virginia's Prince Edward County, Dr. Sullivan oversaw the racial
integration of schools in Berkeley, Calif., and was Massachusetts's education
commissioner during desegregation tensions there.
Dr. Sullivan began his
career teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in Glencliff in his native New
Hampshire. He advanced quickly through his motivation and political acumen,
associating himself with such Democratic Party leaders as Sen. Edmund Muskie of
Maine and the Kennedy family.
In the late 1950s, as a
schools superintendent on Long Island, N.Y., he established
"nongraded" schools that allowed students to be grouped by the rate
at which they learned rather than traditional ordering by age. That provided
vital experience for his Virginia assignment.
After the U.S. Supreme
Court outlawed racial segregation in its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education
ruling, a "massive resistance" movement grew in Virginia, gaining
widespread political support. In an extreme move, Prince Edward school
officials in 1959 shut public schools in their poor, rural district, leaving
nearly 2,000 black students without formal schooling.
After Martin Luther King Jr.'s
1963 march on Washington, President John F. Kennedy paid particular attention
to Prince Edward. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy called Harvard
University's education department to recommend an able administrator. The
college tapped Dr. Sullivan as a leading candidate.
In 1963, he was named
superintendent of a privately financed and nongraded "free school
system" in Prince Edward. About 1,600 blacks and a handful of whites
enrolled, and the educational gap among all students was apparent immediately.
Some 14-year-olds read like second-graders, and others could not read.
Citing flaws in testing, he
said IQ test findings showed that among children who were asked to identify
whether a hatchet or toothbrush was the object most associated with daybreak, many
chose the hatchet because they chopped wood at dawn.
To improve test scores, he
kept the schools open until 5:30 p.m. weekdays and on Saturdays. He hired black
teachers and white teachers, and he brought aboard his educator wife, Martha
Ross Sullivan.
He spoke on the radio about
the importance of education. He invited performing arts groups to the school,
as well as Bobby Mitchell, the first black player for the Washington Redskins.
Meanwhile, Dr. Sullivan's
home was shot at, the roof of his white Buick convertible was slashed and he
fielded threatening phone calls at all hours. "It was a living hell,"
he later said.
The school experiment
lasted the academic year, after which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the
county's refusal to fund public schools was unconstitutional.
The son of Irish-immigrant
laborers, Neil Vincent Sullivan was born Dec. 24, 1914, in Manchester, N.H.
He was a 1939 graduate of
Fitchburg State College in Massachusetts. He received a master's degree in
education from Columbia University in 1941 and a doctorate in education from
Harvard University in 1956. He served as a Navy communications officer in the
Pacific, North Atlantic and Mediterranean during World War II.
As Massachusetts's
education commissioner from 1969 to 1972, he endured verbal battles during
state enforcement of school integration policy. His nemeses included Louise Day
Hicks and John J. Kerrigan, Boston activists and officials who tapped into racial
and class discontent to propel their political careers.
After rumored threats to
his family, he left for a teaching position at Long Beach State University in
California. He became education department chairman and retired in 1984. He
returned to New Hampshire in 1997, after the death of his wife.
He was the lead author of
three books: "Bound for Freedom: An Educator's Adventures in Prince Edward
County, Virginia" (1965); "Now Is the Time: Integration in the
Berkeley Schools" (1969); and "Walk, Run, or Retreat: The Modern
School Administrator" (1971).
Survivors include two sons,
Roger Sullivan of Marblehead, Mass., and Michael Sullivan of Moultonborough,
N.H.; three grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.