‘So mild, so courteous ... so persistent’: Former Newport News Del. Flora Crittenden dies at 97
Former Del. Flora Crittenden, a high school guidance counselor-turned-state legislator beloved for a mild manner and ever-calm presence in Richmond, has died.
She was 97.
During her 32 years at Newport News’ George Washington Carver High School she was the kind of guidance counselor who was there to help if a student was having trouble fitting in, who would connect students with jobs and who regularly visited students and parents at home to keep them on the right track.
“There are people God puts in your life to change the course of your life. God put her in my life and she changed the course of my life,” Newport News Commonwealth’s Attorney Howard Gwynn remembered.
He always liked to share that story when Crittenden was there to listen, in part because it would embarrass the modest legislator.
As a high school senior, Gwynn turned down an offer to go to Dartmouth College, an Ivy League school, in favor of Virginia State — Crittenden’s undergraduate college, and Gwynn’s choice because his cousins were there.
Crittenden called him into her office, trying to get him to change his mind. When he wouldn’t, she typed a letter for him, asking Dartmouth to readmit him, then drove to his home to get him to sign it.
“She said, ‘I’m not leaving until you sign this,’” Gwynn recalled.
“She was there from 7 p.m. to 10, when I finally signed. But she didn’t leave. ‘Now what,’ I said. She said she wasn’t going to leave until I got in her car and she drove me to the post office. At 10 o’clock, I got in her car and she watched me put that letter in the mailbox.”
It was a typical move.
“She was always so mild, so courteous when she was working on an issue. And she was so persistent,” said Newport News Mayor McKinley Price.
A native of Brooklyn, Crittenden came to what was then Warwick County as a 13-year-old, attending Carver and then graduating from Virginia State University before earning a master’s degree from Indiana University and doing post-graduate work at the University of Louisville.
She came back to Carver in 1949 as a guidance counselor.
But the same desire to do more for her community led Crittenden to found the nonprofit organization “Strive” to help teenagers discover positive alternatives, or to set up the full day summer program for children at her church, Trinity Baptist, also led her to politics.
Crittenden worked on Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott’s General Assembly campaigns before she won election to the Newport News City Council in 1986.
“Over the course of her extraordinary life and career, Flora’s work was always centered on bettering the lives of children through education, and her legacy lives on in all those she taught and mentored,” Scott said.
Scott considers her one of his mentors, too.
While serving on the council, Crittenden started on what would become 12 years of service on the board of the Peninsula Transportation District Commission, where she would become chair and would help plan the merger of PenTran with the Tidewater Regional Transit Commission, resulting in the creation of the Hampton Roads Transit.
In 1993, she ran for the House of Delegates, where she would represent Newport News for a decade. The next year, the city renamed the building that had been Carver High School into Flora D. Crittenden Middle School.
In the General Assembly, her fellow legislators declared in a formal resolution, “the halls of power boast of a kinder, gentler ambience as a result of her presence and service to the people of the Commonwealth.”
