Olivia Ferguson McQueen was finally awarded her high school diploma on Saturday, May 25 — some 54 years after she fought to integrate the all-white high school she was barred from in Charlottesville, Va.
McQueen was just 16 in 1958, when the the Civil Rights Movement was coming into full bloom, when she was part of a lawsuit to integrate the Charlottesville City Schools. Despite winning in court, McQueen was outcasted her senior year and was never awarded a true diploma.
But McQueen was armored with the same resiliency with the rest of her mostly young Civil Rights advocates that was led by a young 28-year-old Martin Luther King. Eventually McQueen obtained her master’s degree despite the absence of a formal high school certificate.
There were detours and roadblocks at every turn for the young McQueen. An early 1959 Virginia Supreme Court ruling overturning Massive Resistance that should have required the school system to allow McQueen to attend the previously all-white Lane High School. But the school board had other plans. They barred McQueen from attending Lane, and she was sequestered senior year being tutored in the school board office.
“What a day this is,” McQueen said, according to the HuffPost. “It really was a surprise when I received a call saying that something was being planned, but I didn’t know to what extent something was being planned.”
Albemarle County Public Schools Superintendent Pamela Moran, and Charlottesville City Schools Superintendent Rosa Atkins awarded McQueen her diploma in a ceremony at what is now Burley Middle School. When McQueen was a student, Burley served as the black high school for both county and city students. It is now an Albemarle County school.
In the auditorium where she watched her peers graduate in June 1959, the school system and the Burley High Varsity Club celebrated McQueen’s contribution to generations of African-American school children who came after her.
“I would like to think that I have made a difference, and continue to make a difference,” she said after being handed a framed diploma by Atkins and Moran. “But the truth is, we have all made a difference.”
McQueen began making a difference when she pursued her undergraduate and graduate degrees without a high school diploma. She matriculated through Hampton University, earning her bachelor of science degree in early childhood education in 1963, before procuring her master’s of education from Trinity College in Washington, D.C.
Perhaps because of being blacklisted in her hometown, McQueen devoted the balance of her career as an educator outside of Virginia, county school officials reported. But she didn’t go far. McQueens now calls Washington, D.C. home, a few hours drive north of Charlottesville.
