Peninsula In Passage

Schools

William “Billy” L. Whitley & Ann Johnson Billy Whitley and Ann Johnson have been neighbors, friends and colleagues for well over 50 years. Thanks to their careers in Nansemond County and Suffolk schools, they have two of the area’s most familiar faces. “When I go to Walmart and students come up and thank me, that means a lot,” Whitley says. “They still recognize us but we often don’t always recognize them as adults because we knew them as children,” Johnson adds. Johnson grew up in Chuckatuck, Whitley in Franklin. They met in 1957

when they both started working at Chuckatuck High. After five years teaching in Smithfield, Johnson came as a math teacher. Whitley came as a coach after a two year hitch in the Army as an instructor and baseball player. They were neighbors living in Everets. They stayed at Chuckatuck until it closed in 1965 and the students transferred to the new John Yeates High School on Bennett’s Pasture Road. Johnson and Whitley went too. Whitley remembers, “The school had about 600 students in grades 8 to 12, with, after the freedom of choice laws, about 50 African-Americans.” After a year as assistant principal Whitley was named principal in 1968. Johnson became a guidance counselor in 1972. “I used to sit in my office at Yeates and look out at tractors in the fields,” Johnson remembers. “In 1965 there was only the Perkinson house, the old Nelms house and a few homes in Bennett’s Harbor – the rest was fields of collards and cabbages.” Yeates then had just one black teacher, a science teacher Harold Chesson.

Whitley remembers a courageous black student from Hobson who was the first black ball player in the Peanut District. “He took a beating but he was tough,” Whitley said. “By 1971 we had full integration and we just didn’t know what to expect. But we had a good athletic program and that gave students something else to focus on and share. 96% of the students were good and that gives you something to work with. Athletics helped us weather the storm and we had some good teachers - all on the same page dealing with the students – and we had parents, by and large, we could work with.” The school went to about 1200 students with 10 or 11 mobile units, a second wing added to the school and the library expanded. Curriculum options included vocational agriculture and shop classes.

111