The Blue Site

"Heroes Neglected"

     In 2003, I started researching the history of all-black Lucy Addison High School in Roanoke, Virginia from which I graduated in 1961.   Subsequent research took me eventually  to the Faquier County, Virginia birthplace of the school's  namesake. The resultant story covered over a hundred years of struggle for quality education of blacks, by blacks and for blacks  in Roanoke.     This second  journey into my roots revealed  much about  the  "village"  in which I was rasied - Miss Addison, her proteges and the students produced in that school.   The end product was the Lucy Addison Website and  my first "blue"  story, the website's theme color suggested by the school colors. It eventually grew to mean something more - a class of Stories Not Told  of outstanding African-American character and accomplishment  that our American heritage  has chosen to neglect .

Click on an  image at left  to navigate to its associated blue Story Not Told

The Legacy of Miss Lucy Addison

 An African-American Village That Truly Raised Its Children

- A Website by Thomas R. Dudley

 In 1886, a black schoolteacher,  born into slavery in 1861 in Virginia, arrived in Roanoke to begin a forty-one year career of public service committed to the empowerment of  that city's disenfranchised black citizens.  In 1928, one year after her retirement from teaching, the city's first four-year high school for  African-Americans was dedicated in her honor.  Forty-five years and some five-thousand graduates later in 1973, that same  high school that nurtured the very highest aspirations and traditions of Roanoke's black communities, was closed.  Click on the plaque pictured at left to access the website that documents 112 years of the life and legacy of the "patron saint" of  Roanoke's black heritage and its one and only all-black high school ever, my alma mater.

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Addison's Tuskegee Airmen

Members of the Nation's True Black Sheep Squadron

- A Website by Thomas R. Dudley

  In 2001, while reseaching data  for a black calendar I was creating  for my genealogy club,  I was introduced to the sister of  a deceased Tuskegee Airman , Lieutenant  Marshall Cabiness of Gastonia, North Carolina.  Geraldine Cabiness Daniels proved to be a delightful interview; the photos, stories and memorabilia of her brother were a welcome addition to the club calendar. The thrill of that  personal contact with the family of  a black war hero  was  both inspirational and  prophetic. A few years later, with the discovery that my  alma mater, Lucy Addison High School, had produced four  such World War II heroes convinced me to design and launch the blue line of Stories Not Told. The plan  was to document overlooked, forgotten black institutions and individuals from my hometown,  my state and the nation.  The goal  was to encourage black communities caught up in the country's "smart ain't cool" malaise to re-discover their "smart and cool" stars of the past  whose brilliance had been dimmed only by the dust of community neglect.

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Our Story

Roanoke, Virginia - 100 Years of African - American History In Pictures

- A Website by Thomas R. Dudley

***** Coming Soon *****

Once the Lucy Addison website was launched in 2004, it became apparent that it fell well  short of completing the mosaic  of black Roanoke culture and heritage.  The city, incorporated almost fifty years before the high school's first graduating class in 1929, had seen its black communities struggle, mature and thrive in the matters that mattered most - spirituality, health and education even before the high school's first graduating class. Though their northeast and Gainsborough  neighborhoods were never able to keep pace economically with the rapid development of  white communities to the south and west, black families achieved a robust, blue collar, stability  even while limited to "bottom feeding" jobs in the rapidly expanding  public and private sectors. The reason for that success was simple. It was the will of Roanoke's black leaders - its ministers, doctors, teachers and other professionals. Their determination to become mentors to their flock, i.e. to lead by example  and  to raise the bar for all others  made all  the difference.