Prince Edward County closes its schools
Schools closed September 1959, reopened September 1964Prince Edward County public schools, Farmville, Prince Edward County, VA
Rather than integrate after Brown, Prince Edward County shut every public school for five years. White children were given tuition grants for a private academy; about 1,700 Black children had no school at all.
The case that began in Prince Edward County was one of the five consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education. It started in 1951 with a student strike at the all-Black Robert Russa Moton High School, led by sixteen-year-old Barbara Johns, over a school so overcrowded that classes met in tar-paper shacks and a school bus.
When the courts finally ordered desegregation to proceed, the county's board of supervisors refused to appropriate any money for schools. In September 1959 Prince Edward County closed its entire public school system. White students attended the newly formed Prince Edward Academy, supported by state tuition grants and local donations. No provision of any kind was made for the county's Black children.
Between 1,700 and 2,000 Black children lost their schooling. Some were sent to live with relatives in other counties or states; some were taught in church basements by volunteers; many simply lost those years and never recovered them, and they are known in Virginia as the Lost Generation. Robert Kennedy observed in 1963 that the only places on earth without free public education were “Communist China, North Vietnam, Sarawak, Singapore, British Honduras - and Prince Edward County, Virginia”. Privately organised Free Schools opened for one year that September. In 1964, in Griffin v. County School Board, the Supreme Court held that the closure violated the Fourteenth Amendment and ordered the schools reopened - five years after they shut.
Between 1,700 and 2,000 Black children were locked out of school for up to five years. The shape is Prince Edward County, drawn indicatively; the authoritative boundary is the Census TIGER/Line county file.
Sources
- Moton School Strike and Prince Edward County School ClosingsEncyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanitiesencyclopediavirginia.org
- Education in VirginiaVirginia Museum of History & Culturevirginiahistory.org
- Massive Resistance in a Small TownHumanities, National Endowment for the Humanities (2013)neh.govBacks the Board of Supervisors' refusal to appropriate school funds on 26 June 1959, and the five years that followed.