ORIGINS OF THE SCHOOL CLOSINGS

Prince Edward lies in the “Black Belt,” a stretch of land that extends from the Chesapeake Bay through the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and east Texas. Historically, Black Belt counties “are predominantly rural, have a Negro population of at least one-third (and in some instances a majority), and possess stringent mores and laws requiring racial segregation” (Morland Reference Morland1964, p. 1). It is not difficult to understand why Black Belt communities would be especially determined in their resistance to change, since the development of Black social and economic equality in areas of high Black population would present a substantially greater threat to Whites than in areas where Blacks are a distinct numerical minority (Andrews Reference Andrews2002; Bartley Reference Bartley1969; Muse Reference Muse1961).

The county covers 357 square miles of low, rolling hills. Its social and economic center was and remains Farmville, which had a population of 4293 in 1960 (Smith Reference Smith1965).Footnote ⁴ During the 1950s, the overall county population declined 8.3%, with most of the decrease coming from the Black population, who represented 44.6% of residents at the beginning of the decade. The 1960 census recorded a county population of 14,121, of whom 39.9% were labeled “non-White,” essentially synonymous with “Black.”Footnote ⁵ Though agriculture played a key role in the local economy, with tobacco and lumber the two most significant cash crops, less than one-fifth of the work force listed agricultural occupations in 1960. A shoe factory with 350 employees was the largest industrial plant. In 1959, the median white family income was $4070; for Negro families, it was $1848 (Morland Reference Morland1964). The Negro population included “a substantial element … [that] has acquired comfortable homes and prosperous farmland,” as well as some sharecroppers “who from year to year might have no cash income at all.” The Black professional strata of Prince Edward County included two doctors, one dentist, one mortician and about a dozen ministers.Footnote ⁶ One year after schools closed, the Richmond Afro-American reported that all but three of the county's seventy-two Black school teachers had left the county (Wells Reference Wells1960).

Black residents had been fighting for better educational opportunities for decades prior to the 1951 student strike. By 1934, it was possible for Black students to graduate from an eleventh-grade high school. But because no bus service was yet available, Negroes “out in the county … who wanted a high-school education had to board in Farmville or go untutored past sixth grade” (Kluger Reference Kluger1975, p. 459). The first freestanding Negro high school opened in 1939, aided by funding from the federal Public Works Administration and the state. R. R. Moton High School, unlike the White Farmville High, lacked a gymnasium, cafeteria, locker rooms, infirmary, and an auditorium with fixed seats. Even more seriously, the school became overcrowded almost immediately after opening. County authorities ignored repeated pleas by Blacks for a new high school. By 1947, 377 students were packed into a school built to house a maximum of 180. Rather than constructing new facilities for Negro students, the county built temporary structures to house the overflow of students. These tarpaper shacks—prone to leaks, inadequately heated by single wood stoves—vividly illustrated the racial inequalities in Prince Edward's educational facilities and became a rallying point for the Black community (Kluger Reference Kluger1975; Robert Russa Moton Museum n.d.; Rorty Reference Rorty1956; Smith Reference Smith1965; Turner Reference Turner2001).Footnote ⁷

After years of refusal by the school board to address these concerns, 456 students walked out of the all-Black R. R. Moton High School on April 23, 1951, to protest conditions in the county's schools for Blacks.Footnote ⁸ At the time, the per capita property value of schools was $817 for Whites and $194 for Blacks (Morland Reference Morland1964). After the strike, student leader Barbara Johns phoned NAACP attorneys in Richmond to solicit their help. Though initially resistant, the NAACP was swayed by the students' commitment and agreed to file a school desegregation suit. In 1950, the National Board of the NAACP had decided that it would no longer pursue cases seeking equalization of facilities, instead turning its focus to suits seeking the abolition of public school segregation (Tushnet Reference Tushnet1987; Wilkerson Reference Wilkerson1960). Consequently, if the Prince Edward students wanted the NAACP's help, they would have to insist on a desegregation suit. The students found an early adult supporter in Reverend L. Francis Griffin, the local head of the NAACP who became the undisputed leader of the Black community throughout the school closing fight.

Though it did not face a court-imposed deadline to begin desegregation until 1959, the county began to plan for such an occurrence soon after the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education. In July 1954, two months after the decision, the county Board of Supervisors passed a resolution stating that “it is not only impractical but it will be impossible to operate a nonsegregated school system … [and] that the said board intends to use its power, authority and efforts to insure the continuation of a segregated school system” (Farmville Herald 1962a, p. 4A). Planning for segregated private schools for Whites began in 1955. The Board passed another resolution in May 1956 confirming its intention to close schools after receiving an “Affirmation” signed by 4500 White citizens maintaining that a court “order to mix the races in our schools can only result in the destruction of the opportunity for a public education for all the children of this county.” This statement insisted, “We do not act in oppression of the negro people of this County.”Footnote ⁹

Federal District Judge Sterling Hutcheson declined to set a timetable for desegregation of Prince Edward schools in a January 1957 decision. An appellate court overturned the decision that November. In August 1958, Hutcheson set a deadline of 1965, which an appellate court also overturned, ordering the district court to set a September 1959 date to begin desegregation. The U.S. Supreme Court denied the county's request to stay the Appeals Court ruling (Muse Reference Muse1961).

As in the rest of the resistant South, the state legislature of Virginia had worked furiously to pass legislation that would prevent enforcement of the Brown decision. Virginia was in the forefront of Southern states meeting Brown with “massive resistance,” trying in effect to outmaneuver the Supreme Court and the NAACP legislatively and judicially. The state acted most emphatically in September 1958, when Governor Lindsay Almond, Jr. closed nine schools in three locales—Charlottesville, Norfolk, and Warren County—that were under court orders to desegregate. Over 12,000 students were locked out. (These closings were overshadowed in the national media by the closings of four schools in Little Rock, Arkansas by Governor Orval Faubus.) By late fall, White Virginians outside the Black Belt revealed growing skepticism about the school-closing strategy. “As the recklessness and futility of massive resistance policies became clear,” Lassiter and Lewis write, “white moderates—especially middle-class parents concentrated in urban areas and in counties where Blacks constituted a small percentage of the population—became increasingly vocal in their opposition to policies designed to protect absolute segregation at the expense of public education” (Reference Lassiter, Lewis, Lassiter and Lewis1998, p. 3; see also Hershman Reference Hershman, Lassiter and Lewis1998).

The legal basis for massive resistance collapsed in January 1959 when state and federal courts struck down key state statutes intended to prevent desegregation. Within two weeks, the General Assembly passed a new legislative package proposed by Governor Almond that sought to limit desegregation rather than block it entirely. Two days after that, on February 2, six schools in Norfolk and one in Arlington County began operating on an integrated basis (Gates Reference Gates1962; Muse Reference Muse1961; Southern School News 1956, 1958a). Locales in many parts of the state slowly began to accept the inevitability of desegregation, at least on a token basis.

Segregationists were not ready to concede the fight. The Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties, the state's most influential pro-segregation group, issued a statement asserting: “We deplore the abandonment of massive resistance … as our state's policy in opposition to federal tyranny. We believe some of our political leaders have misjudged the resolute will of our people” (Southern School News 1959b, p. 7). The Defenders certainly were not ready to accept desegregation in Prince Edward County, their point of greatest strength. Their state president was Farmville dry cleaner and former county school-board member Robert Crawford; J. Barrye Wall, the publisher and editor of the Farmville Herald, was a founding member.Footnote ¹⁰ The Herald's editorial was predictably vitriolic. With the move to integrated schools, it asserted, “Virginia, the mother of constitutional government, will have permitted the rape of ideals and principles for which great men have given their minds and blood, suffering almost unbearable hardships.” This will constitute “the abandonment of the high plane” in defending segregation as a state and local prerogative in which the federal government had no right to intervene (Farmville Herald 1959a, p. 1B).

Faced with the specter of operating public schools with some degree of desegregation, the PEC Board of Supervisors refused to appropriate money to fund the public schools for the 1959–1960 academic year. Thus the era of the school closings began. Barrye Wall led the public battle to justify keeping the schools closed rather than operating integrated ones. As the person running the Farmville Herald, then the county's sole newspaper, he was ideally positioned to do so. The round, cigar-chomping Wall was well regarded in the newspaper industry, a past president of the Virginia Press Association known for heading “one of the best and most profitable county papers in the East.” Wall's “editorials offering temperate support of school segregation [were] widely reprinted in the South” (Hanson Reference Hanson1955, p. 12). But the newspaperman was no one-man army. Throughout the county's long, ultimately failed quest to keep county schools segregated, Wall was joined by virtually all influential Prince Edward Whites and by powerful Virginia politicians and journalists in making the case that the county's position was not only defensible, but righteous. The few Whites who were willing to consider reopening schools with some level of desegregation were effectively silenced, as were most Blacks fearful of economic repercussions. To be sure, some members of the Black community were remarkably outspoken, and many showed great determination in their pursuit of a desegregated school system. Nevertheless, it was not until a second Supreme Court ruling in 1964 banned the closure of public schools to avoid desegregation, that the county relented. Not until the 1970s did the schools become meaningfully integrated.

Prince Edward Academy opened in Fall 1959, enrolling 93% of White students who had been eligible for public schools the previous spring (Farmville Herald 1959b, c). In 1961, upper-school students moved from makeshift classrooms to a new $450,000 building in Farmville. For a time, funding for the Academy drew from state and local coffers. After the collapse of massive resistance, the state enacted a program of tuition grants, under which parents not wishing to send their child to the local public school could receive a stipend to send her to a private, non-sectarian school or public school in another district. Thus, no child would be compelled to attend an integrated school. Prince Edward enacted its own tuition grant program to supplement state funding. During the 1960–1961 school year, over 1300 county students received state and local tuition grants, with all but five going to Whites attending the segregated Prince Edward Academy. Students receiving county and state tuition grants could attend the Academy at virtually no cost. The county disbursed over $163,000 in local tuition and transportation grants to families sending their children to the Academy. In August 1961, Federal District Court Judge Oren R. Lewis ruled that neither the state nor the county could provide tuition grants to Prince Edward students for attendance at private schools while public schools remained closed. Lewis also banned a county ordinance that allowed local taxpayers to donate up to one-quarter of real estate and personal property taxes owed to the Prince Edward School Foundation. Through this device, the Foundation had received $56,000 in local tax money.Footnote ¹¹

Why, after the segregated private academy was a well-established entity, did the county refuse to re-open public schools, which would be desegregated in name but populated almost entirely by Black students? William vanden Heuvel, a Department of Justice aide assigned to address the Prince Edward crisis, posed this very challenge in a speech delivered in the county: “It is your right to send your child to such private schools, but cannot this right be exercised without destroying the fundamental institution of public education which safeguards against innocent children being the prisoners of poverty and social status?”Footnote ¹²

“PRINCE EDWARD'S POSITION IS AS CLEAN AS A HOUND'S TOOTH”

Prince Edward's answer to vanden Heuvel's question was, in a word, “no.” In justifying this negative response, Wall and other county leaders used numerous rhetorical strategies. Among the most prominent were the following: (1) we are fighting on a high plane for an important constitutional principle, namely, the rights of states and localities to make their own decisions without federal interference; (2) the responsibility for the lack of educational options lies with Negroes themselves; (3) private schools are perfectly acceptable replacements for public schools, and may even be superior; and (4) we Whites pay the lion's share of local taxes, so we may spend tax revenues as we see fit. These claims were legitimated by the portrayal of White resistance as unanimous, non-violent and well-mannered. Moreover, White businessmen, who did not depend on outside investment or on an educated workforce, found it in their economic self-interest to support the school closings.

Wall suggested that individuals continuing to fight for separate schools should be referred to as “patriotic constitutionalists” rather than “diehard segregationists” (Farmville Herald 1959d, p. 4A). In several exchanges of personal correspondence with state legislator John Hannah Daniel, Wall asserted the broader implications of the county's fight. In early 1961, he urged Daniel to “please press the point that this suit affects the entire south and it is the last time we will have the opportunity to fight this decision on a high constitutional plane. Prince Edward's position is as clean as a hounds tooth and legally defensible.” Later that year, Wall told Daniel: “The cold turkey is: Prince Edward is the only buffer between the NAACP and federal courts and school integration in rural Virginia. We believe we can win something better than integration, even if it must be done through the ‘judicial legislative’ process. Schools in rural Virginia are operating normally this year, because Prince Edward is still fighting.”Footnote ¹³

Segregationists in Prince Edward often took turns privately to offer encouragement to their compatriots. In 1956, Louis Dahl—a storeowner in Farmville who was closely involved in the fight to preserve segregation—wrote to Rep. Watkins Abbitt, who represented Prince Edward in Congress from 1948 to 1973:

Despite Dahl unwittingly exposing himself as one of those individuals who could not spell “principles,” his belief in the cause was unshakeable. Wall, one of the founders of the Defenders, wrote glowingly about the organization's annual convention in a 1958 editorial:

With evident pride, Wall quoted the Defenders' founding principles espoused in 1954. These included the assertions:

Wall repeatedly told readers that Prince Edward was fighting a battle that reached far beyond the question of whether to operate desegregated public schools: “We know one thing—we can devise another system of education, but, once lost, we can not retrieve a Constitution. The Constitution may be changed by means of amendments as provided by the document itself, but change in the basic Constitution by judicial legislation is an attack upon the liberties guaranteed by the instrument. This we feel it is our duty and privilege to defend” (Farmville Herald 1958b, 1B). Two weeks later, he insisted that the “question of private vs public schools has no place in the present controversy” facing the state (Farmville Herald 1958c, 1B). When the state abandoned massive resistance, Prince Edward was left alone to save the Constitution, from the standpoint of Wall and his allies. Five years later, as much of Virginia had accepted token integration and the PEC case continued to bounce around the courts, Wall editorialized that the people of Prince Edward “have never compromised the principles for which they have stood. They must win this legal fight. Too much sacrifice has been made, the questions involved are too grave, the answers too important to the liberty and freedom of all Americans and to the future of education for their cause to be lost” (Farmville Herald 1963a, p. 1C).

Segregationists outside the county reinforced the convictions of local Whites. From 1959 to 1970, over 600 delegations traveled to the county to observe Prince Edward Academy (Murrell Reference Murrell, Lassiter and Lewis1998). The county received praise in print from, among others, the Birmingham Post-Herald's John Temple Graves, whose pro-segregation columns were syndicated in numerous papers, the Farmville Herald included. “For peaceful, provident and effective resisting,” Graves wrote in August Reference Graves1958, “the South's prize belongs to” Prince Edward (Graves Reference Graves1958, p. 1C). Richmond News Leader editor James Jackson Kilpatrick was the most outspoken and articulate journalistic voice in Virginia on the fight to turn back desegregation. After his lengthy editorials urging Virginia to ignore the Brown decision via the obscure doctrine of interposition proved to have little practical value, Kilpatrick counseled Virginians to be flexible in their responses to federal desegregation edicts. Replacing public schools with private schools was one option. Kilpatrick gave the graduation address to the White Farmville High School in June 1959, the last commencement before the school closings. He assured the crowd that “the resolute and courageous action of Prince Edward taken quietly and unflinchingly after years of patient endurance, and when no other tolerable alternative could be discovered, is in the finest tradition of American political independence” (Farmville Herald 1959e, p. 1).Footnote ¹⁵ Powerful U.S. Senator Harry F. Byrd (D-VA) praised “the gallant little county [that] is fighting against great odds to protect a principle it believes to be right” (Time 1961).

PEC Whites took pride not only in the high principles for which they saw themselves fighting, but also in the gentlemanly way in which they fought. “At no time,” Wall claimed in a 1960 editorial, “have we in any manner spoken ill of the Negro citizens. Many of them we have known for one and two generations…. We hold them in high respect and many with affection” (Farmville Herald 1960a, p. 1C). An editorial in June 1963 noted with some pride, “No law has been broken in Prince Edward, no court order defied, no bigotry or demagoguery used” (Farmville Herald 1963b, p. 1C). This “civilized” stance was characteristically Virginian. Cabell Phillips, a native Virginian, explained to readers of the New York Times in Reference Phillips1957 that:

Out-of-town visitors often were struck by the polite reception they received. Helen Baker, a Black woman who began working in the county for the American Friends Service Committee in October 1960, said, “I came here expecting all sorts of strife and tension, and I have found instead a great restraint and unfailing courtesy. These people are not gun-toting bums” (Graves Reference Graves1961, p. 1C).

The extent to which violence went unreported by its victims or the media is not altogether clear. J. Barrye Wall, as the editor and publisher of the only newspaper in the county and a leader of segregationist forces, had a clear incentive to cover up any threatened or actual violence that did occur, and to insist that Whites were kind to their Black neighbors, willing to help them in any way they could. Robert Crawford, the local dry-cleaner owner who headed the Defenders, said emphatically: “If this community should suffer just one incident of klannism, our white case is lost. No matter who starts it, the whites will be blamed. We must not have it” (Hanson Reference Hanson1955, p. 15).Footnote ¹⁶ Richmond-based sociologist and activist Ed Peeples, who published the first scholarly account of the school closings, describes the role of violence and intimidation thus: “That very special Virginian form of intimidation was at work, and they didn't really need a bully, a Klansman, and they didn't need the White Citizens Council because they had the Defenders, who were the equivalent of it …” Still, Peeples maintains, “I'm confident [people working under direct or indirect orders from White leaders] beat up people but we'll never know … I can't prove it” (Peeples Reference Peeples2007).Footnote ¹⁷

Local contractor and former school board chairman Lester Andrews, who wanted to see schools reopened, believed that there were a small number of Whites in the county who would resort to violence.Footnote ¹⁸ For their part, White leaders laughed at the expectations of violence that outsiders brought with them. “Outsiders come here expecting to see the white people of the town running around with baseball bats trying to hit the Negro,” Blanton Hanbury, the head of the segregated academy, told a reporter (Ripley Reference Ripley1962b, p. 12). Fifteen years after the schools reopened, Reverend Griffin summed up the local atmosphere during the closings era: “What little violence there was, was isolated and unorganized. There were reprisals, yes, but they were more tactful and sophisticated” (Egerton Reference Egerton1979, p. 64). Such reprisals might include social shunning, threatened or actual economic reprisals and physical intimidation (Peeples Reference Peeples2007). This relative aversion to explicit violence was reflected statewide. The Southern Regional Council counted 225 acts of racial violence in the eleven Southern states from January 1, 1955, to January 1, 1959. Only two took place in Virginia (Yorktown and Alexandria), both involving intimidation of Black families in formerly all-White residential areas.Footnote ¹⁹ The apparent tranquility in the county and the state stood in pointed contrast to the more explicit violence and intimidation that occurred most often in the Deep South. Had overt violence emerged in PEC, the legitimacy of White claims, in the public sphere and in the courts, would have suffered considerably.

THE SILENCING OF DISSENT

These explicit or implied threats of social and economic reprisals were effective in silencing many voices of dissent. (The small population of the county made silencing easier to enforce than in a larger, less intimate community.) Thus, the dominant narrative of the school closings appeared to be authoritative in part because there was so little space for counter-narratives disputing the good intentions and rightful cause of the school-closing forces. In the context of this apparent unanimity, White leaders could depict the closings as reflecting broad public opinion and common sense.

“Moderate” Whites were pressured to refrain from open dissent. An informal group of White businessmen began meeting secretly to explore possibilities for reopening the schools. The Bush League, as it was referred to derisively by segregationist Whites who rejected any whiff of compromise, counted an estimated 350 to 500 people who were willing to help in the effort, among them 150 or so who had attended at least one meeting. The fifth meeting, in June 1960, became the final one after the identities of approximately forty attendees leaked. In addition, clandestinely recorded meeting minutes circulated around town, along with an unsigned diatribe against the Bush Leaguers:

One businessmen said with resignation: “We say nothing any more. We have to be all for the private schools. Otherwise they say we're all against” (Goodman Reference Goodman1961, p. 89; Smith Reference Smith1965).

The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), which had staff members in the county from 1960 to 1965, set out to round up White moderates who supported reopening of the schools.Footnote ²⁰ They had a very difficult time trying to find people willing to adopt this position publicly, though AFSC staffers spoke with a number of Whites troubled by the situation in the county. Lester Andrews was one of the Bush League leaders. He told AFSC's Harry Boyte that his business and manufacturing had declined as a consequence, and that the Town Council had acted punitively in setting parking regulations for his shopping center. Andrews went on to say that it was only when his wife and children suffered reprisals that he withdrew temporarily from these efforts. All of his employees had experienced blatant reprisals as well.Footnote ²¹

Saturday Evening Post reporter Irv Goodman estimated in a Reference Goodman1961 article that roughly 5% of Whites were not in complete sympathy with the private-school movement. “They do very little talking,” he observed, recounting the costs paid by several Whites who dared question the strategy. Among them were a school board member branded a “nigger lover” when he opposed the sale of the county's public schools (he subsequently withdrew from the dispute); a barber who questioned the turn to private schools and lost customers as a result; and a Presbyterian minister who lost his pulpit in 1955 after saying it was wrong to close the schools. It was not until 1962 that a White parent of school-age children criticized the school closings publicly (Hamilton Reference Hamilton1962). When Goodman visited the county in Reference Goodman1961, he found only one White person who continued to speak against the closings. He did not reveal the person's name, but it was presumably Longwood College Dean C. G. Gordon Moss, whose opposition grew increasingly vocal as the closings dragged on. Even this one dissenter felt it necessary to qualify his position: “I am not an integrationist in the sense that I believe the two races can mingle closely. But I can't see why this mistreatment is necessary” (Goodman Reference Goodman1961, p. 89). (Moss would later become an avowed integrationist.)

The muting of dissent was possible in part because a small group of people had a virtual stranglehold over the county's affairs. During this time, the Board of Supervisors—which made all of the important political decisions in the county—was dominated by native-born farmers, who held five of the six seats. The remaining one was held by John Steck, an editor at the Herald who marched in lockstep with his boss there. AFSC's Harry Boyte sighed: “My amazement continues to grow and it sometimes seems as if this is not really America when one begins to realize the total control exercised over the people of this town and this county by a very small select group of White citizens.”Footnote ²² In Prince Edward, farmers had little reason to seek outside investment or to assure an educated workforce. Uneducated workers were more desperate, more pliable. The business community held limited influence, and those members of the business community who did wield power backed the political leadership. Their controlling interest in local banks, and thus their influence over a large portion of the business and home mortgages in the community, lent weight to the veiled threats of economic reprisals.Footnote ²³ In this light, the political leadership's disregard for possible economic consequences of the closings, and the scarcity of objections to the school closings, is intelligible.Footnote ²⁴

WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR CLOSED PUBLIC SCHOOLS?

Beyond Prince Edward's claim that its (White) residents stood unified in defending sacred constitutional principles without rancor, violence, or intimidation, White leaders insisted that they were not responsible for depriving Black children of education. That onus lay with an overreaching federal government and with outside agitators—mainly the NAACP—who had misled Black residents into relinquishing public education. The refusal of local Blacks to accept the help of Whites in starting their own private schools drew repeated criticism in the pages of the Farmville Herald. In 1958, the president of the Prince Edward Educational Corporation—which raised money to fund the segregated academy—insisted that “we have thought of [the Negro children]. In our policy statement we declare our intention to cooperate with Negroes in the setting up of their own school system, if they ask for such cooperation. So far, they have shown no interest. Maybe they think we are bluffing. Maybe they are characteristically trusting to luck. When they wake up to reality, we will be there to help them in every way except financially” (Chodorov Reference Chodorov1958, p. 3).

In December 1959, the Herald ran a front-page story on Southside Schools, a public corporation chartered by some of the county's most ardent segregationists to help local Blacks form their own private, segregated schools. The Black community was not consulted about the formation of Southside Schools. The board issued a statement explaining that “the formation of this corporation was delayed because it was our opinion that responsible Negro citizens of the county should provide the leadership. There has been no action along this line, however …” (Farmville Herald 1959f, p. 1).Footnote ²⁵ Wall, whose son served as the registered agent for the school, had acknowledged privately in September 1959 that “there is no hope that the Negroes would be interested in private schools even as a stopgap.”Footnote ²⁶ He was right: only one Black family submitted an application to these Black private schools run by White segregationists. In the view of the Virginia State Conference of the NAACP, “the parents had the dignity and common sense enough to appraise the scheme as another subtle technique to tighten segregation about their necks and the necks of their children.”Footnote ²⁷ Southside Schools President Roy B. Hargrove admitted that the group of Whites formed the corporation “not just out of love of education but because we knew that public opinion was going to be better with the Negroes in school than out” (Smith Reference Smith1965, p. 172).

Whatever the motivations behind it, the Black private-school proposal served to bolster White self-justifications. In a typical editorial, Wall asserted that “Negro parents, under misguided leadership … chose to follow leadership which has no background of doing anything for the upbuilding of the community in any field instead of accepting a possible solution for continuing an educational program offered by people who had led this community in its many accomplishments” (Farmville Herald 1962b, p. 1C). Wall later claimed, in a July 1963 editorial, that county Whites would have been willing all along to make financial contributions to aid in the operation of Black private schools (Farmville Herald 1963c). It appears likely that such an effort would have been contingent on the plaintiffs dropping their desegregation case. Even if this were not the case, Blacks in the county had ample reason to believe that the formation of Black private schools, particularly with help from local Whites, would undermine their court case.Footnote ²⁸

Wall argued in 1962 that reopened schools would not end the controversy: “Contrary to some uninformed opinion, the opening of public schools (racially integrated) but attended predominantly by Negroes will not satisfy the militant NAACP, and its handmaidens the Southern Christian Association [Southern Christian Leadership Conference]. They … would attack state and county scholarships to parents whose children attend any ‘private school that excludes the Negroes by reason of race’” (Farmville Herald 1962c, p. 1B).Footnote ²⁹ Defending the county's commitment to the education of black citizens, Wall asserted that “public education made phenominal [sic] strides until certain minorities (by no means do we confine these to the activities of the NAACP) attempted to control it” (Farmville Herald 1963d, p. 4A).

Senator Byrd claimed that “the NAACP alone is responsible” for the closed schools because it “is more interested in the integration of public schools than in the education of colored children.” NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins responded at a May 1961 rally in Farmville: “The NAACP controls no schools or school boards,” and Negroes “have no representation in county government … It was the county authorities who decided to close all schools rather than comply with a federal court order.”Footnote ³⁰

While White leaders in the county insisted repeatedly that they were fighting a principled constitutional battle and harbored no ill will toward Blacks, a spirit of vindictiveness is evident in the school closings. A year after the county completed construction of a new Black high school, the Supreme Court decided in favor of the Prince Edward plaintiffs in the Brown case. In the eyes of Hampden-Sydney Professor of Religion Charles McRae, “this so enraged the county supervisors that they seized the opportunity when it came to them to cut off all funds for public schools and so defy the ruling of the courts.”Footnote ³¹ PEC's congressional representative, Watkins Abbitt, also revealed animosity toward Blacks calling for integrated schools. In November 1958, the state's massive resistance laws were on the verge of invalidation by state and federal courts. Looking ahead to alternate strategies of preserving segregation, Abbitt asserted: “It may be necessary for some localities to give up public schools temporarily.” “However,” he added, “these localities should start at once considering closing all schools and not just the White schools” (Richmond News Leader 1958b, p. 1). (No White parents wanted their children to transfer to Black schools, so the latter would not need to be closed under massive resistance legislation, unless Whites applied for transfers solely to force closure of Black schools.)

Although the proximate causes of the county's decision to close public schools in PEC were the Brown decision and the Black community's demand for integrated schools, some suspected more far-reaching motives. Gordon Moss argued in a 1962 speech that [members of] the county's small wealthy population

The Defenders stood firmly in favor of abolishing public schools, and both state and county attorneys warned as early as December 1954 that public schools might close for a number of years if the state were not permitted to make a “gradual adjustment” to the Brown ruling (Southern School News 1954, 1955). Indeed, U.S. News and World Report spoke admiringly of the Commonwealth's plans to fight desegregation, and observed: “[S]ome Virginians predict that several communities might find themselves maintaining public schools attended only by Negroes—with all the white children going to private schools” (1955, pp. 49–50).Footnote ³³

An August 1958 article in the right-wing publication Human Events looked with some glee at the prospect of White private schools sprouting in the wake of court deadlines for desegregation:

Earlier in the year, Wall's Farmville Herald had also mused on this “sacred cow”: “The basic concept of universal education might be examined for some changes. An opportunity should be given every child for a bisic [sic] education—certainly so far as literacy is concerned. That is a duty of the parents, the state and the local community. But pupils who do not apply themselves, nor have the capacity, nor the ambition need not tear down an educational system which has cost so much to provide and to maintain” (Farmville Herald 1958d, p. 9). In private correspondence, Wall was more blunt. In January 1957, he told Congressman Abbitt that “we are working [on] a scheme in which we will abandon public schools, sell the buildings to our corporation, reopen as privately operated schools with tuition grants from Va and P.E. county as the basic financial program … Those wishing to go to integrated schools can take their tuition grants and operate their own schools. To hell with 'em.”Footnote ³⁵

Others insisted the public schools had shortcomings that went beyond the threat of desegregation. School Board Chairman W. Edward Smith argued that “many people of the County, as is true of many of the people elsewhere, had become greatly disturbed by many of the innovations and procedures being followed in public schools but which did not appear to be directed toward the education of the child but which … seemed to be directed toward the conditioning of the child for a particular way of life.”Footnote ³⁶ More pointedly, a Richmond News Leader editorial warned that “nothing is to be gained by slavish devotion to the cause of public education” (1959, p. 12).

WHITE TAX DOLLARS FOR WHITES

Behind the county's stubborn refusal to reopen schools, no matter the cost to black residents, was a vexing legal question: “Can a legislative body be forced to levy taxes by a federal judicial edict?” If the answer is yes, Wall wrote, “the control of the public school system is in the hands of the courts, for if they can order taxes levied, they can dictate the amount of taxes to be levied, and if they can dictate the amount of the levy, we find ourselves being taxed without representation contrary to the basic principles upon which this Republic was founded” (Farmville Herald 1963d, p. 4A). (Unsurprisingly, Wall did not mention that Black residents were perpetually taxed without representation.) The Supreme Court's 1964 decision to uphold the District Court's mandate that the county must assess taxes for the operation of public schools did not come easily. In his study of the Supreme Court's decisions regarding racial equality, Klarman observes that this was “a virtually unprecedented decision, about which several justices had doubts. Who knows whether they would have overcome these doubts, had it not been for the county's extraordinary defiance of Brown, which had lasted for an entire decade?” (Reference Klarman2004, p. 342).

For all of their ostensibly high-minded rhetoric about principles of governance and local decision-making authority, White leaders also suggested that they simply did not wish to spend tax money on the education of Black children. This strain of thought was not unique to Prince Edward County. Indeed, Southern states and localities typically only made any real effort toward equalizing Black and White school facilities when desegregation loomed. In congressional testimony, Sen. A. Willis Robertson (D-VA) warned that “if the South is forced into private schools it means no education for the majority of the colored children of the South, who cannot afford the private schools. We have been hard pressed in the South. In most Virginia communities colored people do not pay one-tenth of what it costs to provide schools comparable to the white schools and teachers comparable. In most communities we have met that test.”Footnote ³⁷ Criticizing NAACP opposition to taxpayer funding of private schools in locales with no public schools, a Herald editorial argued:

These words aptly illustrate the strong strain of paternalism that characterized Whites in Virginia, who viewed themselves as the most genteel of Southerners. Gordon Moss noted in a 1962 speech that the paternalism in PEC “was probably more pronounced, more self-conscious, and the citizens thereof took more pride in it than in any other place that I had ever lived in the state of Virginia.”Footnote ³⁸

County leaders—most of whom, with the exception of Wall, were quite well-to-do—were also practicing the politics of self-interest. Eighty-one percent ($761,489) of Prince Edward County's budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 1958, was devoted to school expenditures. While state and federal funds covered more than half of school outlays, $349,189 in school funds were to come from local sources. With projections of slightly under $400,000 to be collected locally from taxes and other fees, around 87% of local revenues went to fund public schools (Farmville Herald 1958f, g, h). For those county leaders dubious about the wisdom of operating public schools—much less integrated ones—the incentive to carve public school funding out of the county budget was obvious.

When the county Board of Supervisors passed a budget in June 1959 that included no funds for public schools, they also proceeded to cut property taxes by 53% (Southern School News 1959c). Three years later, the Supervisors slashed property taxes again, from 3.5% to 1% of valuation. This large decrease was made possible by an unused allocation of $600,000 for local tuition grants, which a federal court disallowed in 1961. In the wake of this ruling, the Prince Edward School Foundation still managed to collect $10,000 in combined state and local money from students living in neighboring Cumberland County (Southern School News 1962).

In a 1962 conversation with AFSC staffer William Bagwell, Barrye Wall said that if the courts ordered the school doors unlocked, “certainly we could reopen our schools and do a good job with it . . Of course, only Negroes will attend the public schools and some of us do not see why we should support such schools when the Negroes pay almost no taxes.”Footnote ³⁹ (Wall failed to explain how Blacks could be expected to contribute more tax dollars without access to quality education and good jobs.) When the county was forced to reopen schools for the 1964–1965 school year by verdicts in the U.S. Supreme and District Courts, this attitude was evident.Footnote ⁴⁰ Though enrollments in the county's public and private schools were expected to be roughly equal, the Supervisors appropriated $189,000 for public schools—desegregated in theory but expected to be virtually all Black—and $375,000 for local tuition grants.Footnote ⁴¹ PEC Whites did not see themselves as acting callously or unfairly. “The taxpayers of Prince Edward have graciously supported public schools for many years,” Wall argued. “Even though the white people pay 66.8 per cent of the local taxes, the Negro citizens 9.8 per cent and the public service corporations 23.4 per cent, there has been no quibbling about the appropriations for separate public schools” (Farmville Herald 1961a, p. 1B). In this view, the issue was a local government's prerogative to spend its tax money as its primary taxpayers—that is, White citizens—saw fit.

TEST-DRIVING THE NEW CONSERVATISM (DISCUSSION)

By closing public schools and attempting to subsidize private, segregated schools using taxpayer dollars, Prince Edward County sought to establish the outer limits of legal resistance to public school desegregation. As part of this strategy, White leaders portrayed their position as grounded in long-established, non-racial, legal principles. In doing so, the County tested a new strain of political rhetoric. While PEC failed in its legal attempt to maintain closed public schools and subsidize segregated private schools, its public articulation of a refined segregationist ideology, designed to align with “mainstream” American values such as local self-control, taxpayers' rights and individual choice, later gained currency in a wide array of political contexts.

This “colorblind” defense of segregation can be understood as a second wave of resistance that followed earlier tactics of direct repression. Violence (or the threat thereof), once a central strategy in maintaining the racial hierarchy, lost some of its effectiveness as bloodshed began to draw Black-sympathetic media coverage and to provoke federal intervention to secure Black rights (e.g., Barkan Reference Barkan1984; Lipsky Reference Lipsky1968; McAdam Reference McAdam1982, Reference McAdam1983). In locales where overt violence and repression had a longer shelf life, particularly in the Deep South, the second wave of segregationist defenses emerged after the earlier strategy faltered. Thus, as examined by Crespino (Reference Crespino2007), many White Mississippians did not turn to this strategy until the late 1960s. In other locales, particularly in the Sunbelt, the threat of imminent desegregation did not emerge until around the same time period (Lassiter Reference Lassiter2006). To these Whites, the colorblind defense held the most promise, as most of them did not view violence against aspiring integrators as either morally right or strategically effective.

This transition to a colorblind defense of segregation was, to use McAdam's (Reference McAdam1983) phrase, a “tactical adaptation” by Whites, a reaction to the progress of the civil rights movement and the growing ineffectiveness of explicit oppression. Prince Edward's Whites made this shift well before the late 1960s. They did so not because they were forward-thinking—far from it—but because this heavily Black county, a stronghold of segregationist sentiment steeped in Virginia traditions of civilized resistance, was forced to respond to an early court order to desegregate its schools (as one of the five Brown cases).

The Prince Edward case calls for a rethinking of the roots of modern conservative rhetoric. Lassiter argues that “massive resistance ultimately exposed the myopic vision of the rural leadership of the white South and transformed quotidian middle-class concerns about educational quality into a grassroots political mobilization against Black Belt recklessness” (Reference Lassiter2006, p. 29). While Lassiter is correct in identifying the shift in political power from the Black Belt to the Sunbelt, the political defense of segregation did not shift from Black Belt obstinance to Sunbelt colorblindness; more accurately, colorblindness emerged as a strategy that could be employed alongside or as a replacement for explicit resistance. Local communities did not all react in the same manner and at the same time to the threat of desegregation. In light of this variation, we must look beyond the Black Belt/Sunbelt distinction and beyond rural/suburban differences to understand strategies of segregationist resistance in Southern communities. I do not mean to imply that other scholars of segregationist resistance have lapsed into regional determinism; a number do, however, suggest that suburban Whites led the way in creating the new conservatism (Lassiter Reference Lassiter2006; McGirr Reference McGirr2001). I argue that rural Prince Edward, an early adopter, shared the sense with other early adopters that segregation could be best defended with reason, not brute force.

In his study of Mississippi conservatives, Crespino (Reference Crespino2007) critiques the Southern strategy thesis, which asserts that Southern White racism was refined and euphemized to form the bedrock of modern conservatism. Instead, Crespino joins scholars such as Lassiter and Kruse in making the case that the South—having undergone profound social and economic transformations, which resulted in a shift of political power from the rural Black Belt to the Sunbelt's sprawling suburbs—changed to become more like the rest of the U.S. As he acknowledges, Mississippi, the poorest, least urbanized state with the largest African American population and a moderate business community that was small in size and influence, was late in shifting to a more refined brand of racism. Crespino is correct in pointing to the contributions of rural and small-town White Mississippians to the formation of mainstream conservative viewpoints. But Virginia and its last bulwark of unapologetic segregation, Prince Edward County, began to bridge the gap between the Black Belt and the Sunbelt at least a decade before Mississippi.

This is not surprising. From the very beginning, Virginia's style of resistance to desegregation—restrained, eschewing overt violence, and couched mostly in non-racialized language—was much closer to contemporary conservatism than was Mississippi's. In the late 1950s, Virginia was already beginning to experience a shift in the balance of political power from the rural Black Belt to its suburban areas (Lassiter and Lewis, Reference Lassiter, Lewis, Lassiter and Lewis1998). While the rest of the state began shifting its focus to minimization of integration, Prince Edward “stood steady,” to use Wall's oft-repeated call to arms. PEC Whites stressed that the crux of the issue was maintaining local autonomy and individual freedoms in accord with the Constitution; that Blacks themselves were the culprits in denying educational opportunities to their children; that privately-run schools offered a greater variety of educational options, and superior ones at that; and that their rights as the primary taxpayers in the county included full discretion over how those funds were spent.

Half a century later, echoes of the Prince Edward mentality ring. In this view, localities are autonomous entities with the sole authority to tax their citizens and to distribute these tax dollars as they see fit. Prince Edward essentially adopted a “fee for service” mentality: those who pay the most in taxes should receive the most benefits. This approach is exemplified currently by many suburban localities, which attempt to “cherry pick” residents—luring taxpayers and shunning tax users—and separate different classes of residents within them (through devices such as school tracking, homeowners' associations “governing” subdivisions, and residential-only land-use restrictions). Increasing services and benefits to lower-income residents only serves to shortchange taxpayers and lure more tax users (Frug Reference Frug, Kruse and Sugrue2006). For rural locales unable to lure more affluent taxpayers, the next best thing is to strip away vital public services. At the minimum, this reduces taxation levels, and it may even drive some tax users out of town.Footnote ⁴²

The persistent claims by PEC Whites that it was local Blacks who knowingly chose to shun education for their children are reflected in current arguments that it is not Whites who are oppressing Blacks, but Blacks who are holding themselves back. Stated another way, Whites are perfectly willing to help Blacks, if Blacks would only help themselves. As documented in this paper, PEC Whites claimed repeatedly that they wanted to help Blacks obtain schooling for their children, but Blacks refused. Nowadays, Whites often assert that it is “ghetto culture” or a culture of poverty that prevents Blacks from excelling in American society. The problem is not racism per se, but that Blacks spend too much time complaining about unfairness and too little lifting themselves up (Bonilla-Silva Reference Bonilla-Silva2006). Wall expressed such a sentiment in a May 1963 editorial, contending that PEC Blacks “have shown no disposition whatever to reestablish education except upon their own terms … And they cry to ‘high heaven,’ to President Kennedy and Attorney General Kennedy to pull their chestnuts out of the fire and their children out of ignorance” (Farmville Herald 1963e, p. 4A).

An additional connection between Prince Edward's rhetoric in the late 1950s and early 1960s and current discourse relates to conceptions of education. In this view, the path to improving education lies not in putting greater resources into public schools, but in creating competition and giving parents an array of options, private as well as public, to educate their children. The earlier rhetoric about tuition grants, which gained popularity as a mechanism to avoid desegregation, bears similarities to the arguments of contemporary school voucher proponents, who by contrast depict vouchers as being particularly helpful to low-income children in failing schools. Gary E. Johnson, a leading backer of vouchers while governor of New Mexico, wondered, “Why can't we have an entrepreneurial explosion in this country when it comes to educational services? What we've got here is a monopoly” (Wilgoren Reference Wilgoren2000). Segregationists such as Wall made the case half a century earlier that parents should not be compelled to send their children to integrated schools, but instead should be able to select from a range of alternatives, including segregated, private schools.