ield Baptist, formed the moral center of the Civil Rights Movement in
Petersburg, which gained strength in mid-century and was a major center of
action. Dr. Wyatt Tee Walker, the pastor of Gillfield Baptist Church, had
become friends with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the early 1950s when they
were both in divinity school. In 1957 they co-founded the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference (SCLC), an important force for leadership of the movement
in the South. Walker also founded the Petersburg Improvement Association (PIA),
modeled on the Montgomery Improvement Association in Alabama. According to
Walker and other close associates of King, Petersburg had played an important
role, a kind of blueprint for the national civil rights struggle./pi_progindex.20090215.a.pg1.pi0215king1_s1.2288042_top2.txt
"King, Petersburg has special connection", Feb 15 2009 Progress
Index] African Americans in Petersburg struggled, with federal
government support, to desegregate public schools and facilities. Through
sit-ins in the bus terminal in 1960, the PIA gained agreement by the president
of the Bus Terminal Restaurants to desegregate lunch counters in Petersburg and
several other cities. Virginia officials at the top levels resisted school
integration and initiated the program of Massive Resistance. For instance,
rather than integrate, the school board of neighboring Prince Edward County
closed public schools for five years, starting in 1959.
Retail and industry prospered until about
the early 1980s. De-industrialization and structural economic changes cost many
jobs in the city, as happened in numerous older industrial cities across the
North and Midwest. The postwar national movement of highway construction and
suburbanization added to problems. Many middle-class families moved to newer
housing in the suburbs and to nearby Richmond, where the economy was expanding
with jobs in fields of financial
