When Arlington Banned School Dances

A statewide attempt to stymie desegregation in the wake of Brown v. Board of Ed didn't stop local teens from finding their groove.

In September 1959, only months after the first Virginia schools desegregated, an Arlington lawyer and school board member named L. Lee Bean stood up in a meeting and read aloud a newly passed Virginia state law, Joint Resolution 97. 

“No athletic team of any public free school,” Bean read, “should engage in any athletic contest of any nature within the State of Virginia with another team on which persons of the white and colored race are members.” 

If Arlington schools didn’t comply, the state had the authority to close them, so the school board voted to end all athletic events in desegregated public schools.

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This meant no school-sponsored dances, either. The law was part of a statewide “Massive Resistance” movement in which lawmakers and education officials created policies designed to undermine desegregation in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. 

But long before Kevin Bacon shimmied into a fictional town that had banned dancing in the 1984 film Footloose, Arlingtonians were working to create safe spaces where Black and White teenagers could dance. One such place was Mount Olivet United Methodist Church on North Glebe Road. 

In a published church history, Saundra Green, a longtime resident of Arlington’s historically Black Halls Hill neighborhood, recalled how her parents had allowed her to attend dances there “because they knew she would be safe at Mount Olivet.” 

During the ban, the county Parks and Recreation Department also organized integrated dances held at McKinley Elementary School, Wakefield High School and other locations (skirting the law with the stipulation that the dances were not school sponsored). 

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In an oral history recorded in 1992, Constance McAdam, then the parks department’s assistant director, remembered convening a cross-section of community leaders, as well as the police department, to hold the dances and keep them safe.

“There was some apprehension at the beginning,” McAdam recalled, “but it really didn’t take very long for us to come together because it was in a setting where it was important for the social action to take place.” 

Athletic events were reinstated in the schools by the 1961-62 school year, but school-sponsored dances were slower to return. In the meantime, teenagers “kicked off their Sunday shoes” for many years at Mount Olivet, Arlington United Methodist Church, community centers and other local venues.

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