Virgil Alexander Wood (April 6, 1931 – December 28, 2024) was an American civil rights activist and Baptist minister. Ordained as a minister in his late teens, Wood served various churches in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Virginia for over 50 years. He served as pastor of the Diamond Hill Baptist Church in Lynchburg between 1958 and 1963, where he established the Lynchburg Improvement Association, a local chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. As a close associate of Martin Luther King, Wood helped organize the state of Virginia for the 1963 March on Washington. He spent the next 10 years in Boston, where he was heavily involved in civil rights activism, particularly against school segregation. He later moved to Texas after retiring from pastoral duties in 2005, and continued to promote the cause of Civil Rights.
Early life and education Virgil Alexander Wood was born in Charlottesville, Virginia on April 6, 1931. In 1948 he interviewed his grandfather Jesse, who had been born into slavery and recalled witnessing the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation by a Union soldier.
Wood was ordained as a Baptist minister in his late teens. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from Virginia Union University in 1952, and in 1956 he graduated with a Master of Divinity degree from Andover Newton Theological School. He earned a Doctorate in Education from Harvard University in 1973, where his doctoral mentors included Chris Argyris and David McClelland.
He worked as an associate professor at Northeastern University, where he was also dean and director of the university's African American Institute (https://jdoaai.sites.northeastern.edu/). He has also been a professor at Virginia Seminary and College in Lynchburg, and a visiting lecturer, researcher and teaching fellow at Harvard University. He was a Ridenour fellow at the Virginia Tech School of Public and International Affairs. Wood also created the Martin Luther King Jr. studies PhD program at the Union Institute & University in Cincinnati.
Civil Rights Movement
Wood first became involved in the civil rights movement in the late 1950s while serving as pastor of the Diamond Hill Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, where set up a local unit of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) known as the Lynchburg Improvement Association. Wood worked with Martin Luther King Jr. from 1959 until King's assassination in 1968, and had previously worked with his father Martin Luther King Sr. In August 1962, Virgil Wood travelled from Lynchburg, Virginia to Albany, Georgia, as part of a delegation of 103 ministers from across the United States in order to support the Albany Movement, in which Martin Luther King Jr. had already been arrested multiple times. Wood helped to mobilize his home state of Virginia for the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. In December 1963, Wood led 80 youths from North Carolina in a memorial service at the birthplace of President John F. Kennedy in Brookline, Massachusetts, the month after Kennedy had been assassinated.
At various points in his career, Wood was subjected to arrest and legal action for his activism, including serving time in jail for engaging in demonstrations. Virgil Wood and other civil rights leaders were subpoenaed by the Committee on Offenses Against the Administration of Justice in January 1962. On October 31, Wood and two other officials were threatened to be cited for contempt after they refused to answer the committee's questions on constitutional grounds. Wood said that he was interrogated and ridiculed during the committee hearing and that he expected to be cited for contempt, but that he "never expected anything less from a committee so intent upon destroying democracy". In July 1963, Wood was arrested in Danville, Virginia, while participating in a march calling for greater civil rights legislation to be passed by Congress. Wood was also subjected to multiple vigilante attacks due to his opposition to segregation. In May 1961, two days after it was announced that demonstrations against segregation would resume, the windshield and rear window of Wood's car were smashed while it was parked in front of his home in Lynchburg, causing $250 in damage. In 1963, at about 10:30pm on the night of his return from the March on Washington, a rock was thrown through the window of Wood's home in Lynchburg by unidentified assailants. Wood blamed the attack on the recent visit of American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell to Virginia.
Virginia campaigns In 1960, Wood headed a special committee of the NAACP which recommended that stores in Lynchburg which refused to give lunch counter service to black customers should be subjected to picketing and boycotts. On March 10, 1960, the special committee sent a request to the F. W. Woolworth store in Lynchburg, calling for full lunch counter service to all patrons regardless of race. Picketing continued into June 1961, when the Lynchburg Ministerial Association and the NAACP endorsed the Lynchburg Interracial Commission, which was set up by the mayor after sit-down demonstrations brought trade to a standstill. The Ministerial Association's resolution was brought forward by Wood, whose Lynchburg Improvement Association was picketing against job discrimination in downtown stores. In August 1962, Wood also promised that the SCLC would boycott and picket the home games of the White Sox baseball team as part of a protest against segregation. He called for volunteers to continue picketing the team until they received assurances from a city-appointed committee on baseball. Wood also criticised the committee named by the mayor of Lynchburg, William C. Vaughan, because it did not contain a single black member despite there being black players on the baseball team. Wood said that it was "inconceivable that a team could leave two cities because of trouble about segregation and not confront the same problem here".
While on a preaching visit to the Friendship Baptist Church in Toledo, Ohio, in April 1963, Wood said that voting and selective use of buying power were the priority methods for integration in the southern states. He encouraged African-Americans to register to vote, saying that "All over the South we are discovering that the ballot is the most powerful factor in integration". He also said that selective buying was an effective method for African-Americans to use by spending their money at businesses which hired black employees and treated them equally. In the same interview, Wood emphasised this religious commitment to desegregation as a member of the SCLC, saying that "We believe the Judeo-Christian philosophy and American democracy are at stake in the continuation of segregation." He added that "We feel the failure of America to act in its own best tradition has given rise to another problem: black supremacy, as personified by the Black Muslim movement. Black supremacy is as much to be abhorred as white supremacy." In July 1963, the Lynchburg Improvement Association began a campaign for the racial integration of the Jones Memorial Library and the Young Women's Christian Association. Wood said that "if they don't admit us, we will worry the hell out of them with demonstrations". Wood acknowledged that since the library was endowed by a private fund, it had "no legal obligation to admit Negroes if they don't want to", but that "they do have a moral obligation".
Wood and other civil rights leaders also fought against laws requiring segregation in Virginia by taking legal action. In March 1961, Lynchburg City Council set aside a request to declare itself opposed to segregation and instead referred the issue of racial integration to the Lynchburg interracial committee, after approving a motion introduced by councilman Claude A. Hoskins that the committee hold public hearings before giving its recommendations. Wood argued that the matter did not belong with the committee, and that the council ought to make a "public witness" that would "sound the death knell of tension about racial segregation". The Lynchburg Improvement Association called for an immediate end to segregation and threatened to seek relief in federal court. In July 1961, 12-year-old Brian Robinson drowned in an abandoned canal in Lynchburg after the city had closed public pools in order to prevent their use by black residents. Of the three municipal pools in Lynchburg, two were whites-only. The Lynchburg Improvement Association had called for them to be open to everyone, but all three were closed by city manager Robert Morrison after an attempted swim in Miller Park pool on July 4. Wood decried Robinson's "needless" death as a result of the city's failure to comply with court rulings which mandated the racial integration of public pools. Robinson and his parents were also members of the Diamond Hill Baptist Church, of which Wood was the pastor. The boy's mother, Grace Robinson, similarly blamed the city official who gave the order to close the city's pools for her son's death. In July 1962, Judge Thomas J. Michie of Charlottesville, Virginia, announced that he would declare Lynchburg's law requiring segregation of public assemblies as unconstitutional, but warned the plaintiff, Virgil Wood, that officials in Lynchburg would close its armory before they would desegregate it.
At the end of August 1961, Virgil Wood claimed that he had been fired from his role as an instructor at Virginia Seminary and College because of his involvement in civil rights activism. Wood's claim was echoed by Rev. Richard R. Hicks, who said that he was also terminated from his role as an art instructor at around the same time. In October, the executive board of trustees of Virginia Seminary and College passed a vote of confidence in its president, M. C. Allen, after allegations by Wood that Allen had a policy of "firing instructors and expelling students" because the college was opposed to the civil rights of African-Americans. The executive committee's report claimed that there was no evidence Virgil Wood had been fired, but rather that his contract had expired and Wood had not discussed a new contract for the next term until 3 months later, meaning he did not receive a contract for the next year. M. C. Allen denied the allegations, which he said were "an attempt to embarrass me and the school" and that "those men are definitely lying."
In October 1962, a 37-year-old white man, George Walton Brooks, was convicted by an all-white jury for the rape of an 11-year-old African-American girl. Despite being caught in the act by two white police officers, he pleaded innocent and blamed the testimony given by police on "the Rev. Virgil Wood and the NAACP", and ultimately received only the minimum 5-year prison sentence. The next year, Wood was present at the passing of the second death sentence on an 18-year-old African-American, Thomas C. Wansley, who was convicted for the rape of a white woman and a Japanese woman in 1962. Wood and other civil rights leaders expressed concern for the sentence passed on Wansley, accusing the justice system of double standards by comparing Wansley's death penalty to the 5-year prison term given to George Walton Brooks the previous year. Wood had earlier been held in contempt by Judge O. Raymond Cundiff for distributing a pamphlet attacking the first death sentence. Wansley's attorney Reuben Lawson later spoke at a prayer meeting held at Diamond Hill Baptist Church to raise funds to appeal the convictions. Wansley's convictions were overturned by the Virginia Supreme Court in 1964, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment at a second trial in 1967. His 1967 convictions were overturned in 1973 on the grounds that prejudicial publicity in local newspapers, which Judge Robert R. Merhige Jr. described as "shockingly" prejudiced and "highly inflammatory", had deprived him of a fair trial.
Boston decade