"Getting it straight": Southern black school patrons and the struggle for equal education in the pre- and post-civil rights eras

Journal of Negro Education, The, Spring 2003 by Turner, Kara Miles

The striking students returned to school two weeks later, after Attorneys Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson had initiated legal proceedings on their behalf calling for school desegregation. This lawsuit, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (1952), became one of the cases compiled into the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. As a result of the legal threat, the county swiftly built a modern high school for the Black children. At a cost of almost $1 million, it was the nicest physical structure of any school, White or Black, in the county. Meanwhile, the NAACP continued pursuing school desegregation, and in the spring of 1959, a Federal Appeals Court ordered the county to begin admitting students to the White schools on a nonracial basis, beginning that September. In response, the county Board of Supervisors cut property taxes by more than half, thus not leaving enough money in the budget to finance the public schools, effectively closing the schools. From 1959 to 1964, there were no public schools in Prince Edward (Kluger, 1975; Smith, 1965; Turner, 2001).

The school closings era has been the most oft-studied period of Prince Edward's Black educational history (Peeples, 1963; Smith, 1965; Sullivan, 1965). While most White children, however, continued their schooling in a newly organized segregated private school, Prince Edward Academy, most Black children received little or no formal education during four of the five years that schools were closed. The Black community, along with help from outside organizations, rallied to try to help their children through this crisis. Black leaders worked to get upcoming seniors transferred to Kittrell College in North Carolina so that they could graduate on time. Several hundred Black students were sent outside the county to continue their schooling under the auspices of a local Black organization, the Prince Edward County Christian Association (PECCA); the state teachers association for Blacks, the Virginia Teachers Association (VTA); and a Quaker organization, the American Friends Service Committee. To try to provide some semblance of an education to the hundreds of children who had no choice but to remain in the county while the schools were closed, PECCA, in conjunction with national Black organizations, set up what they called "training centers," run by volunteer members of the local Black community. There were also "crash programs" put on in the summers by the VTA and other groups. In the fifth year of the school closings, the Kennedy administration aided in putting together a privately financed, integrated free school system in the county, on an interim basis, descriptively called the Prince Edward County Free Schools. In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled that the county was legally obligated to maintain a school system and ordered the schools reopened for the September 1964 term (Kluger, 1975; Peeples, 1963; Smith, 1965; Turner, 2001).

After exhausting all legal options, Prince Edward schools eventually reopened in the fall of 1964, with only a handful of White students and severe underfunding. As late as 1979, only around one-fifth of the public school population was White although Whites comprise approximately 60% of the county's total population (Smith, 1979). Gradually, the White public school population has risen to around 40% and the majority of the teachers are now White. According to Foster and Foster (1993), in 1991 there were 74 Black teachers and 99 White teachers, and 9 Black administrators and 10 White ones. As happened in many places after desegregation, the names of the former Black schools were changed from names honoring Black leaders, to, in this case, the generic Prince Edward County Elementary, Middle, and High schools (Foster & Foster, 1993).