I would venture to guess that a majority of Isle of Wight residents don’t know who Henry L. Marsh III was, nor would most of them particularly care. We all should.

Marsh was a legendary civil rights lawyer who played a central role in breaking the back of school segregation in Virginia. A Richmond native, he also became that city’s first Black mayor and a respected state senator. He died Jan. 23 at the age of 91.

While he was a Richmonder through and through, Marsh always proudly claimed a close kinship to Isle of Wight County. He wasn’t a son of the county, but he was, quite literally, a nephew.

Marsh was one of four children. His mother died when he was 5 years old, and his father made what must have been a heartwrenching decision. He turned to his wife’s two sisters — one living in Newport News and one in Isle of Wight — and asked them to care for his very young children.

And thus, young Henry and two of his siblings came to live in Carrollton with Aunt Amy Palmer and her husband, Uncle Otis.

Henry’s father never intended the separation to be permanent, and five years later, with the children old enough to help care for each other, he reunited his family in Richmond.

But those five years in Isle of Wight helped make the young Marsh the crusader he would become. 

Marsh’s late-life recollections of those days are recounted in a two-part taped interview conducted as part of the Virginia Supreme Court’s Oral History Program in 2008.

In the interview, Marsh tells how he and his siblings walked five miles to school each day, leaving at dawn and returning at dusk to the Palmers’ home on Smith’s Neck Road.

“When I first started, I was 5½ years old, and when I left I was 11. I found out later that the white children were going to Smithfield, Virginia, to a huge school with separate sections of the class for each group of students. In other words, the fifth grade had two or three sections and that type of thing,” he recalled.

The one-room school he was attending in those early days, by comparison, housed seven grades, all being taught by one teacher. There was no lack of caring, but education was a challenge.

“The way she managed seven grades was that she had the older students teaching the younger students so that she kept everybody busy. She involved us, which reinforced the lessons,” he recalled.

As they walked to school, they were passed by school buses carrying white children to the school in Smithfield.

“I remember seeing the buses going by and we talked about it, but eventually I knew that they were getting a more intense education than we were getting,” he told the interviewer.

When the family was reunited in Richmond, Marsh was enrolled in George Mason Elementary. He later graduated from Maggie L. Walker High School.

Marsh’s father used every opportunity to provide his children with additional education. Each summer, he sent them to live with relatives in North Carolina, where the school system operated during the summer months in order to free students in the fall to harvest crops. Thus, the Marsh children were attending summer school each year.

Marsh’s path toward a legal career was charted while he was a senior at Virginia Union University. He testified before a Virginia General Assembly committee, opposing the state’s “Massive Resistance” program aimed at perpetuating school segregation.

It was then that he met prominent civil rights lawyer Oliver Hill, who encouraged him to attend law school. Marsh did, as did his brother Harold, and both became civil rights lawyers.

In 1965, he testified before the U.S. Senate in an effort to ensure that Virginia would be included in the Voting Rights Act being crafted at that time. The state ultimately was included.

Marsh actively engaged in politics throughout his life. In 1966, he was elected to the Richmond City Council and, in 1977, was named its first black mayor.

In 1991, he was elected to the state Senate. As a senator, he was outspoken in his efforts to promote broader voting rights and educational opportunities.

His court cases in civil rights law were groundbreaking. Early in his career, he sued Philip Morris for racial discrimination in employment, a case that set precedents in that field.

He is probably best known, however, as the NAACP attorney who sued Virginia school districts to end school segregation.

That work began when Marsh took on the city of Norfolk. Following that, the NAACP filed — and won — suits against 50 localities, including Isle of Wight County.

The Isle of Wight suit was filed in the U.S. District Court in Norfolk. It alleged that county officials “fail and refuse to adopt and execute a plan that promises realistically and promptly to convert said public school system to a unitary non-racial system.”

A year later, the county was ordered to develop a plan to fully integrate its public schools.

Marsh returned to Isle of Wight on a number of occasions as a speaker for local NAACP dinners and other events. 

In 1986, Henry Marsh and his siblings came back to Isle of Wight together. They gathered in the Macedonia A.M.E. Church Fellowship Hall to honor their aunt and uncle, Amy and Otis Palmer, who had given them a crucial start in life and who were celebrating their 50th anniversary.

 

John Edwards is publisher emeritus of The Smithfield Times. His email address is j.branchedwards@gmail.com.