Senator Tim Kaine, Anne Holton, and the Meaning of Character: A Personal Reflection
I was born in 1947 and am more than a decade older than Senator Tim Kaine and his wife Anne Holton. However, as I listened to the Vice-Presidential acceptance speech the Virginia Senator delivered at the Democratic National Convention and watched his wife Anne Holton, current Secretary of Education of the Commonwealth, sitting next to her father, former Governor of Virginia Linwood Holton, I thought back to my own formative years in Newport News, Virginia. It was there that my eastern European Jewish grandparents improbably immigrated at the turn of the twentieth century, and it was there that the Holton family taught me much about the roots of character.
In November of 1969, I had just graduated from the College of William and Mary and was teaching at Dunbar Elementary School in Newport News to a segregated class of all black students. Linwood Holton was elected the first Republican Governor of Virginia since Reconstruction that same year and Governor Holton and his wife made the highly publicized decision to send Anne and their other children to a public school attended predominantly by African American students. The moral impact and meaning of this decision cannot be exaggerated. It engendered great controversy and says a great deal about the historical context of the struggle for civil rights and against racism at this point in American history.