Poison Pill

Virginia has been a long time recovering from its embrace of massive resistance to desegregating its schools By Daniel B. Moskowitz

School’s Out Robert R. Moton High, in Farmville, Virginia, presented a forlorn appearance in 1962-63.

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PHOTO CREDIT PHOTO CREDIT L ong before they became a nation, Britain’s North American colonies recognized the core need for an educated populace and society’s obligation to provide that education. In 1635 Virginia opened the first free taxpayer-supported public school. During the 1640s, the governing body of the

Massachusetts Bay Colony ordered every town in the colony’s jurisdiction of 50 or more residents to hire a schoolmaster to teach at least the basics of reading, writing, and mathematics. By the time the colonies declared independence, the idea that public education was a central responsibility of local governments was embedded in the American psyche. Literacy and numeracy were tools basic to the task of fulfilling the promise that all had a right to pursue happiness. Given the importance of public education in a democratic society, it was particularly startling in the late 1950s to see officials in a number of states advocating completely shutting down their public schools; even more startling, a handful of systems actually did so. To facilitate so drastic a step, state legislatures deliberately rescinded longstanding statutes requiring local governments to provide public schools.

The powers that be in those states held that more important than educating the public was the need to prevent integration of White and Negro children—an integration that had been mandated by the U.S. Supreme

Court in 1954 in the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Most communities in the 11 Southern states spent years vigorously fighting that mandate, and when forced to integrate responded so grudgingly that a mix of racially divided housing patterns, legal and bureaucratic hurdles, violence, and intimidation either kept most Blacks out of supposedly integrated schools or sent Whites fleeing public schools for segregated private alternatives. As late as the 1968-69 school year, only 32 percent of

African American public-school students in the Southern states were in schools with White classmates.

But at least those public schools were open. Nowhere was the extreme measure of combating integration by entirely shutting down public education as pervasive—and as persistent—as in Virginia. In that state’s Prince

Edward County, schools closed for a full five years. White students received pared-down schooling at supposedly private academies that actually ran on tax dollars. Some Black families endured great hardships to send their children to schools elsewhere. But a good half of the Negro children in Prince Edward County during those years simply went untaught.

Richard Vaughn, for instance, was in fourth grade in 1959 when the schools closed. He went to work picking tobacco for $15 a week. When the schools reopened in September 1964, administrators put Vaughn into the eighth grade. He wasn’t ready for eighth-grade work and dropped out after a year, never obtaining a reliable grasp of reading or writing. In 2004 Richard

Vaughn was living in Prince Edward County and had a five-year-old daughter going to public school.

In issuing the 1954 Brown ruling, the justices openly recognized that finding racial segregation in education to be inherently unconstitutional necessitated a profound restructuring of public school systems across much of the country. The normal process in litigation is that when judges find a practice unconstitutional, they order that it be stopped immediately.

But the high court’s members realized that school integration would cause

such upheaval that ordering segregation to end immediately would be unwise.

The year after the first Brown decision, the court issued a blueprint for implementation known as Brown II. This declaration recognized that segregation took so many forms that no single rule for desegregation would be feasible. Brown II said that while school integration should proceed “with all deliberate speed,” local judges in weighing proposals to abandon racially separate school systems and fashioning desegregation orders should take into consideration local conditions. Jurists did not need to demand immediate total integration but only that school boards be seen as making “a prompt and reasonable start” in that direction.

When Brown was handed down, some 4,500 school districts in the 17 Southern and border states enrolled pupils of both races. A small but not insignificant number of previously segregated districts in those states recognized Brown to be the law of the land. In the 1955-56 school year, Negroes and Whites were admitted to the same schools in 570 districts.

But in most states that had organized themselves into the Confederacy, the idea of integrated schools met widespread intransigence. Taking a leadership role, Senator Harry F. Byrd, Jr. (D-Virginia) turned that opposition into an organized movement. Almost immediately after Chief Justice Earl Warren had announced the initial Brown decision, Byrd declared, “If we can organize the Southern states for massive

“Massive resistance,” U.S. Senator Harry Byrd said, would show the rest of the country that the south would not accept racial integration.

resistance to this order, I think that, in time, the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South.” Byrd scorned the leeway the Court had suggested in Brown II. In early 1956 he drafted a “Southern Manifesto on Integration” in which he claimed the justices had overstepped their authority and were threatening the region’s “habits, traditions, and way of life.” He managed to get his manifesto signed by 101 members of Congress—all but 27 of those from the 11 states that had made up the Confederacy. Other Southern politicians may have opposed integration as staunchly as Byrd, but none had at his disposal as powerful a political machine as Byrd’s. As governor and then senator, he had built a network of reliable acolytes in nearly every county office in the state’s rural areas, and rural Democrats controlled the legislature and top jobs in state government.

The first step in massive resistance—taken even before the Supreme Court had issued integration guidelines in Brown II—was for Byrd minion and Virginia Governor Thomas B. Stanley to name a Commission on Public Education to outline a plan to guide the state’s backlash against the federal government. That all-White, all-male body recommended: • The governor be empowered to close schools in any district. • The legislature pass a law authorizing local school boards to assign individual pupils to particular schools. • The state provide tuition payments to parents opting to enroll children in all-White private schools.

Commission members realized that those moves might not be enough to keep successful legal challenges from forcing racial integration of public schools. To remedy that, the commission added an even more explosive recommendation; namely, that the state move to repeal the provision in its constitution requiring a system of free public education. Repeal would clear the way to close schools if no more avenues to fight integration remained. The legislature went even further, in late 1956 denying state financial aid to any system with racially integrated schools.

In September 1957 President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered 1,000 U.S. Army paratroopers to Little Rock, Arkansas, to ensure admission of nine Black students to Central High School over Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus’s opposition (see p. 30). Eisenhower’s action clearly signaled to opponents of integration that theirs was a lost cause. But, as Virginia lawyer Ira M. Lechner put it, “the political climate in Virginia was not ready for a rational approach.”

In 1957 Virginia Attorney General Lindsay

Separate and Unequal Before the shutdown, tudents attend a 9thgrade English class at R.R. Moton High School.

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Almond successfully ran for governor on a platform with a simple plank on integration: “Never.” Taking office in January 1958, Almond focused on school systems under court orders to integrate. That September he directed local officials in three jurisdictions to ignore the federal mandates and shutter their schools. Almond’s demand covered six schools in Norfolk, the high schools in Warren County in the Shenandoah Valley, and a high school and elementary schools in Charlottesville, home of the University of Virginia. Warren County and Charlottesville managed to tap philanthropies for enough money to keep teaching in donated spaces in churches. But charity provided only partial help in Norfolk, where some 3,000 kids simply went unschooled that year.

Courts were having none of it. Three judges sitting at U.S. District Court to hear a constitutional argument ruled in James v. Almond that Virginia “cannot act through one of its officers to close one or more public schools in the state solely by reason of assignment, or enrollment or presence in, that public school of children of different races...The equal protection afforded to all citizens and taxpayers is lacking in such a situation.” And the Virginia Supreme Court in Harrison v. Day held that the state constitution did not allow state officials to take over educational activities from local school boards. Both came January 19, 1959—Robert E. Lee’s birthday and a holiday across the South. Compliance was to begin the next month.

But the most egregious example of abandoning public education was just beginning. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, in that state’s southern tier, halfway between the Atlantic Ocean and West Virginia, the county that the southern states had had good reason to secede. General Lee spent the night of April 8, 1865, in Farmville, the county seat, before crossing into adjacent Appomattox County to surrender to Union troops, bringing the Civil War to an end. Prince Edward County had been at the center of the school desegregation battle since well before the Brown decision. The county’s Blackonly Robert Russa Moton High was so deficient in staff, materials, and educational quality that in May 1951 the NAACP sued in federal court, claiming Moton students were being denied the equal protection of the law guaranteed in the 14th Amendment. In March 1952, under the legal procedure then in place, a three-judge District Court panel ruled against the NAACP, which appealed that ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court. Around the country other legal challenges to the constitutionality of racial segregation per se— regardless of the quality of Black schools—were being brought. The Justices consolidated five

Virginia Attorney General Lindsay Almond

board within two months of the Brown decision had passed a resolution stating that the board was “unalterably opposed to the operation of non-segregated schools.”

That stark intransigence was manifest in the five-year shutdown of public schools that began in the county in September 1959.

Prince Edward County had a special place in the memories of those who clung to the belief

Pondering a Path of Resistance Southern governors meet in Richmond to discuss how to block racial integration in public schools. From left rear J.P. Coleman of Mississippi; Marvin Griffin of Georgia; George Bell Timmerman, Jr. of South Carolina; and Thomas B. Stanley of Virginia.

cases that had arrived at the high court. Arguments in the five were heard together, and a single decision was issued in May 1954. In an effort to make the point that the ruling was not an anti-South decision, the case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, was listed first. That is the way the decision covering all five cases, including the one from Prince Edward County, is known. Because the Supreme Court did not order that the school systems involved in the five cases immediately end segregation, Prince Edward officials used every device to avoid compliance until, in 1959, they had run out of ways to delay integration and closed down the public school system.

The approximately 3,200 pupils in Prince Edward public schools were roughly divided 50-50 between White and Negro children. There were 13 schools for Negroes and seven for Whites.

Litigation to merge those two systems stretched on until May 1959, when the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond told U.S. District Court Judge Sterling Hutcheson to order desegregation to begin. Rather than do so, Hutcheson retired, forcing the Court of Appeals to issue the order. The school board stood ready to take the ultimate action against segregation. The board had switched from annual appropriations to month-by-month funding—finally making it easy to evade integration by stopping school appropriations. The entire system closed down. “In many

Brown v. Board and a Byproduct of Backlash Outside the U.S. Supreme Court, Nettie Hunt and daughter Nickie commemorate the historic decision headlined by a Washington, DC, daily. Below, Mrs. Althea Jones and pupils in a one-room schoolhouse improvised by Black residents of Prince Edward County, Virginia.

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BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES (2); OPPOSITE PAGE: VCU DIGITAL LIBRARIES; EVERETT COLLECTION/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; AP PHOTO PHOTO CREDIT Defending the Status Quo Farmville, Virginia’s Prince Edward Academy, left, came to be a symbol of the “massive resistance” undertaken by the state of Virginia to federal orders to desegregate its public schools; right, White students in Farmville board county schoolbuses.

Pushing Back A 1960 rally in Richmond, Virginia, protested the policy of closing the state’s public schools.

ways, Prince Edward County was the last stand of ‘massive resistance’ in the state of Virginia,” says historian Larissa Smith Fergeson of Longwood University in Farmville.

Policymakers in Prince Edward County opposed—perhaps feared—the social upheavals that would result from Black and White children getting to know each other as classmates. In addition, many truly believed that federal courts involving themselves in local decisions seriously upended the proper balance of constitutional power.

But the most outspoken local White foe of massive resistance—C. G. Gordon Moss, chairman of Longwood University’s history department—insisted the county’s power structure also had an economic motive: depriving local Blacks of, or shortchanging them on, education made them more pliable workers.

White Prince Edward County didn’t want to keep its children uneducated. County figures set

White families could afford to pay tuition because the county gave financial aid in the form of grants and property tax credits for supporting the academy.

up a foundation to fund the ostensibly private Prince Edward Academy, which, since it was not an arm of government, was not bound by the 14th Amendment requirement to provide equal access to all. Technically, the academy charged a $240 annual tuition; White families could afford that because Prince Edward spun up a skein of financial aid, including tuition grants to parents and credits reducing property taxes by 25 percent for residents donating to the academy. The private classes took place in tiny classrooms in church basements and private clubs, with no cafeterias or playgrounds and few extracurriculars. This arrangement became a model for defiance across the Deep South.

Those Black families that were able to do so put together patchwork schemes to school their children. Black churches raised money so some students close to graduation could attend a high school program at historically Black Kittrell College in the North Carolina town of the same name. County resident Elsie Lancaster sent her daughter to live with an aunt in Massachusetts. The Reginald White family sent all five children to Baltimore, Maryland, to attend the Catholic St. Edward’s School while living with relatives— two sisters with grandparents, two sisters with an aunt and uncle, and a brother with another aunt and uncle. The arrangement made the children so unhappy that after two years the Whites rented a house in Cumberland County just north of Prince Edward; every morning the children were driven to Cumberland, which had not closed its schools, to wait at the empty dwelling for the school bus. Dorothy Holcomb’s parents

used the same ploy, renting a run-down house in Appomattox County and driving her daughter there each morning to catch the bus.

Others took even more drastic actions. The American Friends Service Committee found families in other locales willing to take in Black children from Prince Edwards and send them to local schools. That program enrolled 47 older children. But some 700 Black children—about half of those who had been enrolled in the Prince Edward County segregated schools—went without formal education for the full five years.

The U.S. Supreme Court shot down the entire school-closing scheme in May 1964. In Griffin v. School Board, the justices affirmed that the Prince Edward public schools had been shuttered “only for the constitutionally impermissible reasons of race” and that the closing violated the constitutional rights of all school-age children in the county, regardless of race, because they were being treated differently from students in Virginia who were enjoying the option of attending public school. The justices told the District Court to go ahead and order not only that the county stop reimbursing White families for private school tuition but also resume funding the county school system—even if that meant ordering the authorities to impose a tax in order to raise the money. Jill Ogline Titus, a historian at Gettysburg College, calls that ruling “the most important school desegregation case since Brown.” The justices made eminently clear that they had run out of patience waiting for recalcitrant Southern school districts to integrate. Justice Hugo Black wrote the majority opinion, harkening to the integration mandate in Brown II and declaring, “There has been entirely too much deliberation and not enough speed in enforcing the constitutional rights which we held in Brown.” The Court followed Griffin with a string of other rulings—all the way to 1971—striking down state “freedom of choice” schemes and other devices patently designed to keep Blacks and Whites from attending classes together.

Prince Edward County reopened its public schools in the fall of 1964. Prince Edward Academy kept operating as a Whites-only alternative, not dropping its segregationist policy until 1986. Most White students in the county continued to attend the segregated academy; the reopened and technically integrated Prince Edward public schools enrolled approximately 1,500 Black students and only eight Whites. And those schools were woefully short of resources, meaning that many of those students who stuck it out received grossly inadequate educations. Billy Eanes, for instance, missed four years of school. He achieved success as a restaurateur but 40 years after his high school graduation said, “I can’t spell...When you put a pencil in my hand, I’m a loser.”

Prince Edward Academy also shortchanged its students—and not every White family in the county had recourse to its classrooms. There was no school bus transport for children living outside Farmville. John Hines, from the hamlet of Rice, stopped attending the academy after seventh grade; one sibling never went beyond fifth grade, and two others left school after third grade. And even in Farmville some families stopped sending their offspring to the segregated academy when the courts deep-sixed county tuition grants.

Just after the schools reopened, Robert Kennedy, who had recently

Fighting the Power Above, a July 1963 protest in Farmville. Right, a delegation from Prince Edward County marched in Washington, DC, that August.

There haD been entirely too much deliberation and not enough speed in enforcing the rights upheld in Brown, wrote Justice Hugo Black.

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VCU DIGITAL LIBRARIES; LIBRARY OF CONGRESS OSCAR WHITE/CORBIS/VCG VIA GETTY IMAGES; KEVIN JOHN BERRY/FAIRFAX MEDIA VIA GETTY IMAGES resigned his cabinet post as U.S. Attorney General, wrote, “At least one generation of children in Prince Edward County will always carry the scars of the conflict that closed their schools.” Prince Edward had to adjust to a less well-educated populace. Even 50 years after the shutdown era, the county’s illiteracy rate was 16 percent—33 percent above the statewide rate. Churches fashioned their services around choral responses rather than readings from the Bible. Employers avoided hiring processes requiring written applications.

By far, the “massive resistance” policy did not represent all Virginians’ views. As early as 1954,

Justice Hugo Black

Virginia Governor A. Linwood Holton, Jr. reporter James Rorty was writing in Commentary magazine that “if they were permitted to do so, most of the counties and cities of the Old Dominion could and would begin desegregating their schools tomorrow, although without enthusiasm.”

For instance, almost immediately after the High Court’s decision, integration went forward without any tumult in Catholic schools in Arlington, a part of northern Virginia that until 1846 had been part of Washington, DC. Arlington’s elected public school board announced in January 1956 that it would follow suit, but the state legislature dismantled the school board, assigning that body’s duties to the anti-integration County Board. In late 1958, more than two dozen top businessmen from around the state held a dinner meeting with Almond at the Rotunda Club in Richmond, organized by attorney and Richmond School Board Chairman Lewis F. Powell, who in 1972 became an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. The CEOs told Almond in no uncertain terms that massive resistance was hurting the state’s economy; to avoid Virginia’s toxic atmosphere, corporations were building facilities in North Carolina, they said.

In 1966, Governor Mills Goodwin ushered through the state Education Department guidelines declaring that all public schools in the state must be open to children of all races.

But in many counties that dictate made little practical difference. By then 27 “private” schools around Virginia were operating on the Prince Edward Academy model and were the choice of most White families.

It took another election cycle for Virginia to face the reality of a society moving toward racial integration. In 1970, A. Linwood Holton Jr., who had run as a foe of the entire massive resistance approach, was elected governor of Virginia—the first Republican to claim that post since 1869.

At the beginning of the next school year, Holton enrolled his four children in the Richmond public schools, whose enrollment was overwhelmingly African American. (Daughter Anne married Tim Kaine and became first lady of Virginia in 2006, when her husband became governor; after he became a U.S. senator, she was named Virginia Secretary of Education.)

In the long run, Virginia came to realize that opponents of closing schools had been right, both morally and in terms of what massive resistance wrought on the state’s image and economy.

When the state constitution was revised in 1971, the update included one of the nation’s strongest public education provisions, mandating that Virginia “shall provide for a system of free public elementary and secondary schools for all children of school age throughout the Commonwealth, and shall seek to ensure that an educational program of high quality is established and continually maintained.”

Prince Edward County was significantly longer in acknowledging its wrongdoing and beginning to make amends. The local newspaper, the Farmville Herald, once an ardent supporter of the school closing policy, in 1990 formally conceded that that policy had been wrong.

In 1998, Moton High, the school where black student protests against subpar resources had led to the historic Supreme Court desegregation decision, was saved from demolition and repurposed as the Center for the Study of Civil Rights in Education and a museum featuring artifacts of the struggle. In 2004, in a ceremony celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Brown decision, students who had been unable to finish high school because of the shutdown were given honorary diplomas. And in 2008 the county board of supervisors passed a resolution expressing “sorrow” at the county government’s 1959 action. The board ordered a “light of reconciliation” installed inside the courthouse bell tower. H