Prince Edward County, Virginia, Closes Schools Rather Than Integrate
Ordered to integrate its schools under Brown v. Board of Education, Prince Edward County, Virginia, chose instead to close all public schools on this day. They remained closed until 1964, when the Supreme Court ordered the county to open them, in Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, on May 25, 1964.
While the schools were closed, the Prince Edward Foundation supported private academies to educate white students. There were no formal arrangements for African-American students; some were supported by private groups and others went to out-of-state schools. The “Lost Class of ’59” was one of the great tragedies of the struggle over school desegregation following Brown v. Board of Education. The Little Rock, Arkansas, schools were also closed for the academic year 1958–1959 because of resistance to racial integration.
The closing of the Prince Edward County schools was just one part of the program of “massive resistance” to school integration after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, on May 17, 1954. Other actions included the Southern Manifesto, signed by 100 members of Congress on March 12, 1956; an Alabama law that would have required the disclosure of the names of NAACP members, but which the Supreme Court in NAACP v. Alabama declared unconstitutional on June 30, 1958; and a set of Virginia laws designed to restrict the activities of the NAACP (September 29, 1956; April 2, 1963).
The school closing episode left a lasting legacy for education and race in the county. The 2010 Census reported that the county population was 36 percent African-American. The public school population, however, was a majority African-American, while only 5 percent of the private schools, the legacy of the closing crisis, were African-American.
Watch a documentary on “the Lost Class of ‘59”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
Read the 2015 book on the historic events: Kristen Green, Something Must be Done About Prince Edward County (2015)
Read: Jill Titus, Brown’s Battleground: Students, Segregationists, and the Struggle for Justice in Prince Edward County, Virginia (2011)
Learn more about the Prince Edward County struggle: http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/african-americans-campaign-reopening-public-schools-prince-edward-county-farmville-va-1959-1
Learn more: George Lewis, Massive Resistance: The White Response to the Civil Rights Movement (2006)
Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here