Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County

“Whenever I asked about the reason the white school existed, my mom said that her parents had been looking out for their children. But who had been looking out for the black children? And what had been the cost to them? What was the story I hadn’t been told?” 

The last two questions of this quote get to the heart of the book: Does a community have a responsibility to serve all its children? And what are the consequences of failing to do so? The author tries to reveal the full, unvarnished truth about what happened in her hometown—and thereby answer these fundamental questions. 

“Farmville is still the quiet community where I spent long summer afternoons floating in my parents’ pool. On the surface, it is a perfectly charming Southern place to grow up, a seemingly wholesome town to raise a family. That is, until you dive in.” 

Early on, Green juxtaposes descriptions of her idyllic childhood town with stories of Farmville’s complex history and painful past.

“Setting out on this journey of discovery and peeling back the layers of my town’s history will mean questioning the explanations I have been given about what happened in Prince Edward. It will require acknowledging that I come to the story from a place of privilege, in large part because of the color of my skin. I attended college financed by my parents, who also attended college, while generations of black children were denied educations, their lives and bright futures forever altered by the school closures.”

Green acknowledges that the researching and writing of this book challenged her beliefs and sense of identity. She must come to terms both with her family’s role in the school closings and her own white privilege, which allowed her to emerge unscathed from the turmoil of the 1950s and 1960s—unlike the black children in the county. 

“On May 17, 1954—three years after the Moton walkout—the Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling that racial segregation in public education was unconstitutional. Warren, delivering his first major opinion, wrote that separating children ‘solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone.’ The detrimental impact, the court found, was more profound when the law sanctioned segregation.” 

The landmark Supreme Court decision declaring that separate schools for black students were unconstitutional sets the scene for what followed in Prince Edward County. NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall predicted that school integration would occur within five years of the ruling. But as the history of Prince Edward County shows, the reality was far different—and opposition by white Southerners far more powerful than predicted. 

“In his quest to avoid desegregated schools, Byrd would coin the phrase ‘massive resistance’—becoming the face of the South’s defiance of Brown—and extend his reach beyond Virginia’s borders. He believed that if the Southern states could organize against the court’s decision, it would be only a matter of time before the rest of the country realized that the South would not accept integration.” 

This passage refers to Virginia Senator Harry Byrd Sr.’s policy of enacting numerous state laws specifically to resist desegregation. Examples include cutting school funding and ordering the closure of any school faced with integration. As a result, Virginia successfully avoided desegregating its schools well after the Supreme Court ruling mandating integration. 

“The paper raised fears that the Brown decision would contribute to the spread of communism by dividing the country, and it suggested that other regions of the United States—the North was often mentioned—were attempting to slow progress in the South. ‘Certainly the best way to curb [the South’s] prosperity is to foment rifts in its churches and schools,’ one editorial read.” 

The Farmville Herald was a local newspaper published in the 1950s and 1960s by J. Barrye Wall, a staunch segregationist. The quote shows the lengths that Wall went to, and unsubstantiated claims he used, to defend segregation. 

“The words leap off the page. I sit in stunned silence. Since I was a child, I have known that Papa helped establish and oversee the operations of the private school for white children. He served as a board member for at least twenty-five years. But I had pictured my grandfather traveling down a path chosen by other white community leaders, helping out, doing what was asked of him in that effort to build a new school. I thought of him as a loyal supporter, nothing more.” 

Here, Green describes the moment she learned that her grandfather was a founding member of the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties, a segregationist group active in establishing Prince Edward Academy. During her research, she has to come to terms with the fact that her family was not simply following the lead of others but were direct participants in the closing of schools in Prince Edward County. 

“We, the undersigned citizens of Prince Edward County, Virginia, hereby affirm our conviction that the separation of the races in the public schools of this county is absolutely necessary and do affirm that we prefer to abandon public schools and educate our children in some other way if that be necessary to preserve separation of the races in the schools of this county. We pledge our support of the Board of Supervisors of Prince Edward County in their firm maintenance of this policy.” 

These words come from a petition that white parents sent to the board of supervisors of the public schools. It was signed by more than 4,000 people (half of the whites in the county), indicating how deep-seated and widespread the resistance to integrated schools was in Prince Edward County. 

“Gordon Moss, an associate dean at Longwood [College in Farmville], denounced the decision as ‘unchristian’ and an act of ‘unintentional evil.’” 

This passage represents Moss’s response to the county’s decision to close the public schools. Though he was a white man, he allowed black demonstrators to sit in his pew when they tried to integrate the town’s churches (costing him his job as church treasurer) and was one of a small number to send his white children to the Free Schools in 1963. His example shows that a small minority of whites did stand up to the injustice of the school closings. Green has to grapple with the fact that her grandfather could have done the same and chose not to.  

“Black parents had no plan. For years they’d heard the threats to close the public schools, but they figured that’s all they were. Threats. No one wanted to believe that white leaders would actually refuse to provide public education. Even if white townspeople tried, surely the courts would not let them get away with it.” 

Black residents were blindsided by the decision to close the public schools. When the schools actually closed, they had no options. Even if they had planned for the closure, however, they did not have the resources that whites did to create an alternative. Thus, most black students simply stayed home, missing four years of education. 

“Her classmate Jim Ennis, now the county’s commonwealth’s attorney, had been kept in the dark, too. Ennis, the son of a Farmville television salesman, cared about his circle of friends, what he was going to do after school, and how much homework he had to complete each night. He was oblivious to everything else, particularly the politics surrounding the school closings. ‘You go to school, and you go where your parents tell you to,’ he explained.” 

Ennis was a classmate of Green’s mother. When they were schoolchildren, neither understood the reason they were enrolled in Prince Edward Academy. Like black children, white kids can be seen as innocent players in the controversial school closings. They had no real say in where they went to school or why. White adults used children of both races as their pawns, so to speak. 

“In public life, the rules were stricter. In Farmville in the 1950s, just about every aspect of life was segregated. The churches were separate. Blacks and whites didn’t eat in the same restaurants. Their children attended separate schools. They swam in adjacent lakes at a state park. They didn’t sit together in the movie theater. One movie theater was just for whites; the other theater allowed blacks to sit upstairs. Water fountains and restrooms were separate. Often, the black facilities—if they were even offered—were grossly inferior. At many restaurants, blacks could order food for take-out but there was nowhere for them to eat inside. They weren’t permitted in the library’s reading room, either. Even the creek that ran through town was segregated. Black kids played in it one day, whites the next.”

This passage shows the extent to which all of society was segregated in the South. The first sentence refers to the fact that there were different rules for black-white interactions in private versus public life. Green explains that, though the relationship was unequal, many whites hired blacks to work in their homes and were comfortable interacting with them within that personal sphere.

“Ever since fourteen-year-old Betty Jean Ward could remember, she, her parents, and her siblings gathered around the dinner table each night, talking and laughing and telling stories about their day. Friends filed in and out of the brick house on Main Street in Farmville to hang out with her older brother and sister and to play basketball on the backyard hoop. They were a happy, normal family. And then they weren’t.” 

This is just one example of how some black families were split up by the public school closings. Betty Jean’s two older siblings went to attend classes at Kittrell College, but she wasn’t old enough, so she went to a nearby county to live with her grandparents and attend school there. The children were separated from their parents and separated from each other. Green writes that, from this point on, they never all lived in the same house again. 

“When Gwen was tiny, Elsie loved to sit with her daughter on her lap. They spent all their time together, and Elsie referred to the girl as her ‘sweet baby doll.’ By the time Gwen went to school, she could write her name and tie her shoes. Her teachers were surprised by how prepared she was. But not Elsie.

“She had always known that her daughter was exceptional, and she wanted to make sure that the girl’s intellect didn’t go to waste. Gwen needed more stimulation. Elsie knew that if she kept her at home, in Prince Edward County, without access to the education she deserved, she risked history being repeated. She couldn’t bear for her daughter to be trapped working as a housekeeper or doing other menial work. Elsie always regretted not leaving Farmville as her sisters had. She wished she had done more with her life, and she didn’t want Gwen to end up like her.”

This passage shows how close Lancaster and her daughter were—and how hard and important a decision it was to send Gwen away so that she could continue her education. 

“Change was coming, but in the South, in particular, it was happening slowly. By 1958, Virginia was one of only seven states, including South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana, that still maintained segregated public schools. In 1961, when Eisenhower’s presidency ended, only 6 percent of black children across the country were attending integrated schools. Often only one school in a school district would desegregate, and the rest would do nothing at all. Instead, school districts waited for the issue to be brought before the courts. The burden of school desegregation fell on the shoulders of black parents.” 

Desegregation took place slowly in the South, even after the 1954 Brown decision. Because the Supreme Court had not issued a deadline or a method for integrating schools, the white leaders in the South dragged their feet in implementing it; instead of obeying the court’s ruling, they defied it. Black parents and organizations had to continue to bring lawsuits to force desegregation, and in many places only a direct court order would bring about school integration. 

“The country was becoming increasingly disgusted by Prince Edward, which was making national headlines for its still-closed schools. Dr. Robert L. Green and a team of researchers from Michigan State University, funded by the US Office of Education, came to town, attempting to determine how black schoolchildren had been affected. They would soon learn that the illiteracy rate of black students ages five to twenty-two had jumped from 3 percent when the schools had closed to a staggering 23 percent.”

The statistics unambiguously show the alarming effect that the school closings had on black students, just in terms of academics.

“And if he hadn’t already made it clear that he considered Prince Edward an embarrassment, Bobby Kennedy cited the county by name at the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation in Louisville in March. ‘We may observe, with as much sadness as irony, that outside of Africa, south of the Sahara where education is still a difficult challenge, the only places on earth known not to provide free public education are Communist China, North Vietnam, Sarawak, Singapore, British Honduras—and Prince Edward County, Virginia,’ he said.’”

Kennedy’s quote puts the situation in Prince Edward County in the 1950s and 1960s in rather stark terms. One county in the richest, most advanced nation on earth is equated with some of the more impoverished and repressive nations of the world. 

“His views had been based on his limited exposure to blacks and on beliefs passed down to him by his grandmother and the country people he grew up around. But in Kentucky, working side by side with a capable black dentist, he admitted to himself that he had been wrong.” 

Here, Green describes her father’s transformation in how he viewed black people. Once he broke out of the closed mindset of his upbringing and actually got to know black people personally, he could see how wrong his views had been.  

“Prince Edward County Public Schools look entirely different than they did forty years ago. Whites now make up 36 percent of the student body, not 6 percent. Black students account for 57 percent, not 94 percent. And a growing percentage of students—about 7 percent—are some other ethnicity or mixed race.” 

The public schools in Prince Edward County have changed over the years to finally become truly integrated.

“In 2014, when the school board requested nearly one million additional dollars in local funds to pay for kindergarten aides, a preschool teacher, and a replacement bus, a new member of the board of supervisors questioned why the county’s per pupil spending was higher than surrounding counties. Supervisor C. R. ‘Bob’ Timmons Jr. was seemingly unable to understand how the county’s poverty rate and history of denying blacks an education has affected its population. ‘But that was 50 years ago,’ he protested.”

Some whites in Prince Edward County still don’t understand how harmful the school closings were. A large part of the population’s missing out on years of education has long-range consequences, Green explains. Black students from that time went on to become parents who cannot adequately support their own children in school to enable them to succeed. The cycle continues without direct intervention.

“When Lacy Ward Jr. was named director in 2008, he believed the museum should tell a bigger story than black students being shut out of school. A black native of the county who had served in the military and lived in other states, he envisioned a museum that told the whole community’s story of the school closures, a story that would bring blacks and whites together. The museum would describe one Virginia county’s transition from segregation to integration.” 

Ward had a clear vision for the Moton Museum and its role in healing divisions in the county. If it only focused on the black students’ experience, he felt the racial divisions would continue. Instead, he wanted to tell the full story of the school closings and subsequent integration by including the perspectives of both blacks and whites. In his view, only by making it a community effort could the healing process begin. 

“The apologies issued to black students over the years have never been enough. It is asking too much of black residents, particularly former students shut out of school, to move past the pain caused by the school closures when vivid symbols of segregation still remain. That the former Prince Edward Academy is still open, even under a different name, suggests that white Farmville’s repentance is conditional: we want to move past our history, but we still cling to the most powerful symbol of segregation.”

Here Green describes how difficult it is for people in the community to put the school closings behind them, even today. She argues that Prince Edward Academy itself, despite its efforts to transform itself into a school that welcomes diversity, is such a powerful symbol of segregation and reminder of the past that change will be difficult as long as it still exists.

“But my daughters will view the world differently. At four and six years old, they have already been exposed to a wider spectrum of people than I had been by the time I went to college. Black and mixed-race children come for playdates at our house. In preschool, Selma hugs a black boy in the hallway and informs me that he is her boyfriend. I know my daughters will grow up having friends—and boyfriends—of every race, because this is their normal.” 

Green expresses her hope in the future. Sometimes change takes place just with the passage of time. As the demographics and social mores of the nation change, attitudes toward race are also changing. Already Green’s young daughters have an openness toward and acceptance of people of other races.