Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County

Because President Eisenhower showed little interest in school desegregation, black leaders were excited by the prospect of action by the new president, John F. Kennedy, in 1961. But in reality, the US Justice Department had little room to maneuver. By itself, it could not enforce the Brown decision by compelling schools to integrate. At best, it could join a desegregation suit only if invited by a federal judge as a “friend of the court.” When the department tried to join a suit filed by black parents against Prince Edward County as a “party plaintiff,” the motion was denied (179).

Other events around the South soon diverted the new administration’s attention. In the summer of 1961, a group of volunteers called the Freedom Riders rode buses from Washington, DC to the Deep South to test the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on desegregating interstate transit. The Riders were taunted, attacked, and jailed along the way. In 1962, when James Meredith Jr. integrated the University of Mississippi, riots broke out, killing two people and injuring hundreds. The next year, the newly elected Alabama governor, George Wallace, whipped up violence with his vow to uphold segregation forever. In the face of these dramatic events, black leaders in Prince Edward County, Virginia wondered if they had been forgotten.

However, in early 1963, Attorney General Robert Kennedy assigned an aide to work on a solution. William J. vanden Heuvel traveled back and forth between Washington, DC and Farmville, speaking with local leaders and state officials. He eventually found common ground with a temporary resolution: Open a free private school for both black and white students—the Prince Edward County Free Schools—with an integrated staff and board. The governor of Virginia, eager for a solution after the summer’s racially motivated demonstrations in Farmville, announced that the Free Schools would open for the new academic year—only weeks away.

The Free Schools’ superintendent, Neil Sullivan, had three weeks to prepare buildings, buses, and supplies (all of which had sat idle for four years) as well as hire teachers. Half of the new teachers arrived from out of state; they wanted to help the community that had been so much in the news. Still, Sullivan lacked a full faculty with only a week before the start of the semester, so he appealed to Virginia State College for student teachers. Tensions were high. Locals harassed Sullivan, trying to scare him with threatening phone calls and letters. (Federal marshals would eventually be assigned to protect him and the staff.) Also, the day before the Free Schools opened on September 16, 1963, a bomb at a Birmingham, Alabama church killed four young black girls.

Only a handful of white students enrolled at the new school. The first was Dickie Moss, the son of Gordon Moss, a dean at Longwood College who had opposed the school closings from the start. Another white student, William Eanes, enrolled at the age of 20 after four years staying home; he needed just one more year of schooling to graduate.

The Free Schools’ black students included Betty Jean Ward, who had attended school for four years in her grandparents’ county, and Skippy Griffin, son of the black leader Reverend Griffin. Both wanted to be part of the solution in their hometown.

Two months after the Free Schools opened, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. The students signed a scroll with a message of condolence and sent it to his widow. In May 1964, Robert Kennedy visited the school, speaking with some of the students and their parents. Shortly after his visit, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, ordering the county to reopen the public schools. The justices found that the decision to close the schools and then give vouchers and tuition grants (from public funds) for white students to attend private schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. County public schools reopened that fall, and the Free Schools closed. But the racial makeup of the schools changed little: Of the 1,500 students enrolled in the public schools, only eight were white.

Green closes the chapter by recounting a meeting with an old teacher of hers from Prince Edward Academy at an event to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the attempt by black demonstrators to integrate Farmville’s white churches. The teacher, Peggy Cave, agrees to talk, but when Green later reaches her by phone, Cave is defensive. She says that everyone needs to just put the episode behind them and move on, but some people feel a need to keep harping on it. Green takes this comment personally and asks, “Weren’t you a history teacher? How can it be wrong to discuss history?” (197). 

Green writes that “[t]he black children whose educations were halted became known as the Lost Generation” (199) and that the loss is still present fifty years later. To explain, she outlines the life trajectory of two black students from Prince Edward County.

The first is Ricky Brown, who was 10 years old when the Free Schools opened; he had not yet been to school at all and struggled to learn to read. He excelled at sports, but academics left him demoralized. He was recruited by colleges for athletics but felt he would not be able to do the class work, so he did not pursue a post-secondary education. He worked for the Virginia Department of Corrections and later became a police officer. He also worked for a power company and ended his career as a school resource officer, “working day after day in the very school system that had denied him an education and a sense of worth” (201).

The second, Doug Vaughn, had a wife and infant by the time the Prince Edward County schools reopened. He supported his wife as she finished high school, but he did not graduate. They moved to New Jersey where he found work in a factory and earned his GED. Later they moved back to Virginia, where Vaughn worked construction before applying for a job with the Virginia Department of Corrections. He completed the training but just barely because of his low literacy level; his instructor said he would have a hard time getting promoted, implying it was not worth trying. Vaughn went on to prove him wrong, becoming a prison warden in 2005. Three years later, he earned a bachelor’s degree in business. Despite his accomplishments, he still couldn’t help wondering what his life would have been like had he been given education early on.

Lastly, Green briefly describes what happened to Gwen Lancaster: She never moved back to Farmville when she was young, not even for summers, as she had settled into life in Cambridge with her aunt and uncle and their three children; Green writes, “Elsie never got to be her mother again. Not the way she wanted” (204). (As an adult, Gwen did eventually move back to Farmville to be near her mother; she declined to speak with Green for the book).