Margaret Elizabeth Pfohl Campbell (4 December 1902–9 January 2004), civic leader and public television pioneer, was born in Clemmons, Forsyth County, North Carolina, and was the daughter of John Kenneth Pfohl, a minister and later bishop of the Moravian Church, and Harriet Elizabeth "Bessie" Whittington Pfohl, a music teacher. She was deeply influenced by her faith and educated at Moravian-sponsored schools, including Salem College, in Winston-Salem, from which she received an A.B. degree in 1923. Pfohl received an M.A. in 1924 from Teachers College, Columbia University. She also did postgraduate study at the University of Pennsylvania (1927–1928) and the University of Michigan (1932).
Pfohl taught at Salem Academy, which she had also attended, from 1924 to 1927 before taking the post as dean of the Moravian College for Women in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1928. Ill health forced her to resign and return home. She recovered and in 1929 was appointed dean of Mary Baldwin College, in Staunton, Virginia. During that time, she helped establish a student government association and the college's Honor Code. She remained dean until 1936 when she left the post to marry widowed attorney Edmund Douglas Campbell on 16 June in Winston-Salem. They moved to Arlington County, Virginia, where Ed Campbell, as he was known, was active in local public utilities and sat on the board of supervisors. Through her marriage, Elizabeth Campbell became the stepmother of two children and, in 1941, gave birth to twin sons. One of the twins, Benjamin P. Campbell, became an activist Episcopal priest notable for his longtime social justice work in the city of Richmond.
The marriage marked a lifelong partnership in which the Campbells worked as a team to dismantle segregation and Virginia's policy of Massive Resistance as well as to foster civic and social improvement causes. In Arlington County, Elizabeth Campbell participated in many volunteer efforts, including the founding of a cooperative nursery school and working with the American Association of University Women. She also taught Latin at the National Cathedral School in nearby Washington, D.C. She adhered to the Moravian principle of tolerance for all religious creeds, and early in the 1960s cofounded Saint Peter's Episcopal Church in Arlington.
World War II transformed the semirural Arlington County as the area became home to newly hired federal workers who clamored for better services and public schools. A crucial development was the proposal in 1947 to open the Arlington County School Board to election. Ed Campbell lobbied for this change before the General Assembly and Arlington's school board became the only such elected body in the state. Elizabeth Campbell ran successfully in the first election in November 1947 and was reelected in 1951, but she chose not to run for reelection in 1955. After the county's elective school board was abolished in 1956, Campbell was appointed to a vacant seat in December 1959, and she retired from the school board in December 1963 having served three times as its chair. She lobbied for expansion of kindergarten, the building of new schools, countywide bus service, and programs for the handicapped, but it is in school integration for which she is best known.
In response to the 1954 United States Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, Campbell, then school board chair, spearheaded a plan late in 1955 for the gradual desegregation of Arlington County Schools. Despite the Supreme Court's decree, in Virginia the plan was seen as radical and divisive, and the reaction from the General Assembly was immediate. Early in 1956 the General Assembly passed a bill terminating the policy of electing Arlington County school board members, and later that year approved a series of laws to block any federally mandated integration of Virginia public schools. Using school funding as leverage, what became known as Massive Resistance resulted in the closing of a number of public schools in Virginia. No longer a member of the school board, Campbell helped found the Arlington Committee to Preserve Public Schools, an organization of 4,300 members that brought attention to plans for state-sponsored support of private, segregated schools and to the illegality of Massive Resistance. In January 1959 the federal court ruled in James v. Almond, a case argued by her husband, that school-closing laws were unconstitutional and, in a separate suit, that those laws violated Virginia's own constitution. In February, Arlington County schools began desegregating when four Black students enrolled at a previously all-white school.
Early in the 1950s, Elizabeth Campbell joined the executive board of the newly formed Greater Washington Educational Television Association (GWETA) and worked to establish a nonprofit and noncommercial educational television broadcast service. She believed that educational television could provide resources that might not be otherwise available to students, and after becoming GWETA president in 1957 she sought to build financial and community support for the station. The first GWETA program, "Time for Science," was produced the following year at borrowed studios, including a commercial station that operated out of a Washington hotel where the production team worked in a hotel suite and used the bathroom as a holding area for animals and exhibits featured on the program. In January 1961, Campbell lobbied Congress for federal funding for educational television stations including the technological access (known as UHF) needed for the new channels. Her efforts to expand educational television proved timely. The following May, Federal Communications Commission chair Newton N. Minow charged in a speech before the National Association of Broadcasters that commercial television was a "vast wasteland." During this period he accepted Campbell's application for an FCC license for WETA.
The station went on the air in October 1961 with a studio located at Arlington's Yorktown High School, a $150,000 budget, a staff of eight, and programming that included local schools. The station became highly successful, and in 1970 WETA expanded to include a radio station. Campbell served as WETA president for its first fourteen years and then moved to become vice president for community affairs. Her interest in WETA was ongoing, and she worked at the station until her late 90s, having never accepted a salary. The year Campbell died, WETA had an annual budget of more than $60 million and was the third-largest producing station in the Public Broadcasting Service system.
Widely recognized for her public service work, Campbell was named a Washingtonian of the Year in 1977 by Washingtonian magazine. Virginia's General Assembly twice honored her work on behalf of public education and public television with resolutions in 1989 and 2004. She and her husband received honorary doctorates from Washington and Lee University in 1989. The Washington chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences recognized Campbell's service to television in 1981 with a Board of Governors Emmy Award, and in 1996 she received public television's highest honor, the Ralph Lowell Award. Her husband died on 7 December 1995 and was buried in the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery in Lexington. Margaret Elizabeth Pfohl Campbell died of a respiratory illness at an Arlington hospital on 9 January 2004 and was buried in Salem Moravian God's Acre cemetery in Winston-Salem. The Washington Post lauded her in an editorial as a "courageous leader of countless early efforts to break down barriers of racial discrimination" whose work with WETA "was a natural extension of her passion for teaching and her indignation at the injustice of segregation in the schools."
Arlington County named an elementary school for Campbell and her husband as well as the street where WETA's headquarters are located. In 2010 the Virginia Department of Historic Resources erected a highway marker noting her achievements on Campbell Avenue near WETA. In 2018 Campbell's name was inscribed on the Virginia Women's Monument Wall of Honor on the grounds of the Capitol in Richmond.
Sources Consulted:
Family information supplied by son Benjamin P. Campbell (2023); Who's Who of American Women, 7th ed. (1972–1973), 127; Elizabeth Pfohl Campbell Personal Papers, 1945–1965, Record Group 19, Center for Local History, Arlington Public Library; Forsyth County, N.C., Marriage Register; Washington, D.C., Evening Star, 26 Dec. 1955, Washington Post, 10 May 1961 (first quotation), 3 Feb. 1963, 22 Oct. 1989 (portraits), 13 June 1991, 12 Dec. 1999; obituaries and memorials in Richmond Times-Dispatch, 10 Jan. 2004, Washington Post, 10, 18 (second quotation) Jan. 2004, and Mary Baldwin College Magazine 17 (spring 2004): 3.
Photograph in Mary Baldwin College Bluestocking, 1935.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Leila Christenbury.
How to cite this page:
Leila Christenbury, "Margaret Elizabeth Pfohl Campbell (1902–2004)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2024 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Campbell_Elizabeth_Pfohl, accessed [today's date]).
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