RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Seventeen black students who endured isolation and their classmates’ scorn to integrate Norfolk’s public schools will be honored Sunday for ending Virginia’s stubborn defiance of court-ordered desegregation.

The Norfolk 17 will be recognized during a service at historic First Baptist Church, a downtown sanctuary that held classes in its basement 49 years ago when six white public schools closed rather than educate the 17.

Twelve of the surviving 14 students will attend on Sunday, and representatives for three of the dead will be recognized.

Andrew Heidelberg, 64, has written about his experience and recognizes the pioneering role he and the other 16 students played half a century ago in ending Virginia’s “Massive Resistance” to school desegregation.

“I can’t help believe that we played a big part in breaking down the walls, of the changing of history in America,” Heidelberg said. “All the country should take notice of this.”

Massive Resistance was Virginia’s answer to Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that outlawed school segregation. Endorsed at the highest levels of state government and promoted by U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd, Virginia cut funds to any school that dared to integrate.

Schools were closed and private academies were created to educate white students who could afford the tuition. The policy primarily affected schools in Charlottesville, Norfolk and Prince Edward County, which continued its own homegrown version of school segregation until 1964.

In Norfolk, three all-white high schools and three junior high schools closed between September 1958 and February 1959 rather than accept black students, said James Sweeney, an associate professor of history at Old Dominion University in Norfolk. Nearly 9,000 students were affected.

At First Baptist Church, the 17 found loving, attentive and demanding teachers. They were taught in the basement of the church after the six Norfolk schools closed rather than accept them.

“It was like going to the best private school in the world,” Heidelberg, a retired banker, said of the church education.

In January 1959, state and federal courts declared that the school closings were unconstitutional. The Norfolk schools reopened in Feb. 2, 1959, and the 17 went on to attend the white schools, ending the state-sponsored era of Massive Resistance.

Heidelberg was a 13-year-old student attending an all-black public school when his parents and civil rights activists sat him down to discuss plans to send him to an all white school.

He wasn’t pleased. He had his sights set on all-black Booker T. Washington, where his classmates would be attending.

“Black kids don’t go to school with white kids,” Heidelberg recalls. “That’s the way I thought, and that’s the way it was.”

In all, 151 black students were selected for an initial pool to break the color barrier. The field was narrowed to the 17 by a panel of white officials.