Victor Joseph Ashe (4 February 1915–9 March 1974), civil rights attorney, was born in Norfolk, the youngest of three boys and two girls of Alonzo Ashe and Sadie Freeman Ashe. He grew up in the Atlantic City section of Norfolk, a racially mixed working-class community located on the waterfront. His father, who packed oysters at a nearby plant, instilled a strong work ethic in his son, and while growing up Ashe held a variety of odd jobs. Raised a Catholic, he attended Saint Joseph's High School, where he was captain of the city championship football team in 1932 and won top honors in his graduating class the following year. Declining football scholarships, he accepted an academic scholarship and enrolled at Villanova College in Pennsylvania in 1933.
After graduating from Villanova in 1937 with a bachelor of science degree in education, Victor J. Ashe entered the Howard University Law School. In 1940 he received a law degree and returned to Norfolk, where he held various jobs while studying for the state bar examination. He passed the examination in 1942 and began to practice law in Norfolk in September of that year. On 9 October 1943 in Washington, D.C., he married Sarah J. Wyche, whom he had met while she was a student at Howard University. His son also became an attorney.
Ashe was exempted from the draft for physical reasons, but in January 1944 he entered the United States Navy as an apprentice seaman. Although he was an attorney, he was not given the opportunity to obtain an officer's commission but was sent instead to petty officers' school and subsequently served as an instructor at the School of Military Proficiency at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Chicago. Exposed to new political and social viewpoints while living in Chicago, Ashe awakened to some of the deeper contradictions in American society and returned to Norfolk after the war determined to fight at home for the fulfillment of the same democratic ideals for which American armies and navies had fought overseas.
Ashe received a medical discharge from the service on 28 June 1945. Soon after he returned to Norfolk, a group of local African American community leaders chose him to run for the city council in the June 1946 election. Ashe was the first Black candidate for the Norfolk City Council in the twentieth century and the youngest of nine candidates in the hotly contested race. He campaigned intensely and received reasonably fair treatment from the local white newspapers, but he lost with a disappointing seventh-place finish. His campaign awakened the political consciousness of the African American community and featured what the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot described as the largest parade of African Americans in Norfolk's history.
In 1947 Ashe unsuccessfully sought the Democratic Party nomination for a seat in the House of Delegates. In June 1948 he ran again for the city council, but because he missed the filing deadline his name was left off of the ballot. Nonetheless, he waged another vigorous but unsuccessful campaign as a write-in candidate. His three campaigns attracted wide attention because he was one of the first Blacks in Virginia to mount competitive campaigns for office after World War II. Ashe presented himself not as a representative of a particular group but as a candidate whose interests genuinely encompassed the entire city, and he received the support of a number of white voters. His campaigns and example energized the African American population and produced an increase in Black voter registration.
Late in the 1940s Ashe became an attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. His most important achievements were in that capacity, and his most significant case concerned school desegregation. On 10 May 1956 he filed suit in the U.S. District Court on behalf of Black pupils who sought admission to previously all-white Norfolk schools. The litigation directly challenged the General Assembly's program of Massive Resistance to court-ordered public school desegregation. The assembly had established the State Pupil Placement Board to take the power to assign students to specific schools out of the hands of local school districts. On 11 January 1957 the federal district judge declared the Pupil Placement Board unconstitutional. In defiance of the state's policy but in compliance with the court's order, the city school board decided to follow the district court's order to desegregate the city's public schools.
The General Assembly had also enacted a statute that required the governor to close any public school that desegregated its student body, and in September 1958 Governor James Lindsay Almond Jr. ordered that the schools in Norfolk be closed. During the winter the governor abandoned the policy of Massive Resistance and reconciled himself to the supremacy of federal law. In February 1959 the Norfolk schools reopened, and the process of peaceful desegregation of the city's school system began. Ashe continued to represent the NAACP during the ensuing years of negotiation and litigation until Norfolk's public school system was finally desegregated. In the opinion of many of his admirers, this was Ashe's finest single achievement, and for it he received the National Bar Association's C. Francis Stradford Award.
Ashe believed that the best opportunities for fighting injustice came through the courts and the ballot box. He never again ran for political office, nor did he play so prominent a public role in the civil rights movement as many other African American leaders. His stature as an attorney and civic leader, however, led Governor Mills E. Godwin Jr. to appoint Ashe the first Black member of the State Board of Welfare and Institutions in 1968. After Governor Abner Linwood Holton Jr. reappointed him in July 1972, Ashe's fellow board members elected him chairman. Ashe was also the first African American appointed to the board of directors of the Norfolk Chamber of Commerce. He sat on the board of directors of the Better Business Bureau of Norfolk and belonged to Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, numerous other social and civic groups, and Saint Mary's Catholic Church in Norfolk.
Victor Joseph Ashe died on 9 March 1974 at Virginia Beach General Hospital following a heart seizure. He was buried in Calvary Cemetery in Norfolk.
Sources Consulted:
Feature articles in Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, 3 May 1946, and Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 11 Feb. 1990; Victor Ashe papers in possession of sister-in-law Mabel Von Dickersohn, Virginia Beach; family history information verified by Mabel Von Dickersohn; desegregation litigation covered in detail in Norfolk and Richmond newspapers beginning with Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 11 May 1956, and in brief in Jane Reif, Crisis in Norfolk (1960); obituaries with portraits in Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, 10 Mar. 1974, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, 16 Mar. 1974.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Tommy L. Bogger.
How to cite this page:
Tommy L. Bogger, "Victor Joseph Ashe (1915–1974)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 1998 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Ashe_Victor_Joseph, accessed [today's date]).
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