Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County,
By Kristen Green
Harper Collins, 2015, 336 pages
Review by Stephen Bergstein
If you think race relations are poor today, imagine what things were like in the 1950s and 1960s, when the south fought school desegregation even after the Supreme Court in 1954 ruled that “separate but equal” schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County looks at a particularly sorry episode in Virginia when a county responded to Brown v. Board of Education by closing its public schools and opening a whites-only private school, depriving thousands of black children of any education at all over the course of four years.
Kristen Green is a journalist who grew up in Prince Edward County. As a child, Green attended the private school that white community leaders created to avoid desegregated schools. Green attended this institution long after the Supreme Court ordered the county to open its public schools to students of all races, but that private school did not welcome black students until 1986. After moving away from Prince Edward County post-college to write for newspapers around the county, Green returned to her hometown, Farmville, to explore the county’s notorious past. While interviewing former classmates, family members, and other witnesses, she came upon a painful truth: her beloved grandfather was among the people who had shut down the public schools in the late 1950s. She writes in Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County, “Ashamed and sad, I can no longer put all the blame on my town for the tragic school closings. My own family is at fault, too.”
The connection between Green’s family and the closing of all public schools in Prince Edward County makes this a partial memoir. That does not weigh down the book, though Green speaks to the old-timers, including her grandmother and others who supported whites-only schools. She is dismayed to realize that old habits die hard, and that many people do not regret opening the Prince Edward School. Others remain as racist as ever, and they resent Green’s effort to dig up this history.
The tragedy of Prince Edward County was that a generation of black students had no formal education at all for five years. Some were sent off to live with distant relatives to learn to read and write. The ones who stayed behind either worked in the family businesses or deemed it an extended vacation from school. Many did not recover. Green interviews blacks from Prince Edward County who remain uneducated. Ricky Brown recalled attending a makeshift training center taught by volunteers in a church basement. “The only thing I got out of that was how to spell my name and the alphabet. That’s all I learned,” he said. Green writes that, for another young man, “Without an education, the road ahead would be a steep one.” Even some poor white children did not attend the new private school. The parents of one white child, John Hines, did not prioritize educating their children, and no one from the school (and presumably no one from the County) tried to change their mind. “John would never return to school, nor would his siblings, who would struggle with illiteracy for the rest of their lives,” Green writes.
The story of how southerners flouted Brown v. Board of Education is familiar, but the disregard that white residents and community leaders in Prince Edward County had for black children is breathtaking. In 1963, motivated educators opened the Free School, which was able to educate some of the children. The school was housed in the old blacks-only public school that the county had shut down in 1959. The building was in a shambles. The Free School’s superintendent wrote, “Apparently, they had never had any intention of reopening public schools once the private white academy was established.” The floorboards were rotting and the wastebaskets had not even been emptied. The new superintendent, recruited from Long Island, worked to find teachers from around the country to educate the students. That effort is among the few bright spots in this book.
President Kennedy denounced the school closings in Prince Edward County. In 1963, his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, said, “The only places on earth not to provide free public education are Communist China, North Vietnam, Sarawak, Singapore, British Honduras-and Prince Edward County, Virginia. Something must be done about Prince Edward County.” At first, the federal courts were not there for the students. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that year ruled that “there is nothing in the 14th Amendment which requires a state, or any of its political subdivisions.. to provide schooling for any of its citizens.” It was not until 1964 that the Warren Court ruled that the school closings were illegal. In its decision, the Supreme Court wrote: “[T]he record in the present case could not be clearer that Prince Edward’s public schools were closed and private schools operated in their place with state and county assistance, for one reason, and one reason only: to ensure, through measures taken by the county and the State, that white and colored children in Prince Edward County would not, under any circumstances, go to the same school. Whatever nonracial grounds might support a State’s allowing a county to abandon public schools, the object must be a constitutional one, and grounds of race and opposition to desegregation do not qualify as constitutional.”
Prince Edward County was big news in the early 1960s, and the case has an online presence through historical websites and commentary. But among the general public, this episode is a distant memory and largely forgotten. Although I am a civil rights lawyer who practices constitutional law, I cannot recall ever hearing or reading about the County’s decision to close its public schools to black students. If you cannot remember this story either, then this book is a good read and a sorry reminder of a bleak chapter in American history.
Z