NONFICTION
‘Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: a Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle’
by Kristen Green
HarperCollins
336 pages; $25.99
The rule of school segregation collapsed on May 17, 1954, when Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka declared public schools separated by race to be unequal and unconstitutional.
Old South wigs began to rotate. U.S. Sen. Harry Byrd Sr., issued a “Southern Manifesto,” howling for “massive resistance” to the federal government’s intrusion into state sovereignty. James Lindsey Almond, Virginia’s dry roasted governor, would damn those who defended “the livid stench of sadism, sex, immorality, and juvenile pregnancy infesting the mixed schools of the District of Columbia and elsewhere.”
Gov. Herman Talmadge pushed forward his proposal to convert Georgia’s public schools into a private system based on “tuition grants.” But Prince Edward County in Virginia’s southern Piedmont rolled out the nuclear option, defunding and closing its public schools between 1959 and 1964. It was a low, desperate move that Time magazine called “the most infamous desegregationist tactic in the U.S.”
According to journalist Kristen Green, in her memoir/report, “Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: a Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle,” shutting down the schools “would forever change the county and affect black families in heartbreaking ways, halting — and sometimes ending — black children’s educations and breaking up families who would send their children away to school.”
Fifty years later, despite sincere efforts by members of the county’s black and white communities to heal the wounds, true reconciliation seems elusive, according to Green, who was raised in Farmville, Prince Edward County’s largest town.
It was “a perfectly charming place to grow up,” she recalls. Then, as a young adult, she discovered her grandfather’s active involvement in the public school terminations. (“He didn’t give an inch,” her former headmaster tells her.) Overcome with feelings of shame and guilt, she decided to kick over the Farmville rock and confront its rattling genteel past.
For Green, “Something Must Done” is a deeply personal book. In 2001, she married “a multiracial man of American Indian descent,” with whom she has two children. Her research, which included interviews with family members and neighbors, is not free of discomfiting moments, some of which tested her civility. When Robert Taylor, the old bourbon who established Farmville’s all-white private school, makes a derogatory reference to “pinto babies,” it’s clear he’s referring to Green’s family. With Southern gentlemen, she quietly observes later, “Nice doesn’t mean good.”
A crucial moment in Green’s dispatch occurs in 1951, when Barbara Johns, an outstanding student at the “colored-only” R.R. Moton High School, assembled her classmates in a general strike. Fed up with Moton’s degraded conditions, their battle cry became, “Down with the Tar Paper Shacks!”
It was a seismic event for the civil rights movement, drawing attention from the NAACP legal team and Martin Luther King Jr. The student protest soon evolved into a judicial clash with Prince Edward County’s school board, and, in due course, the case was bundled with four others into the monumental Brown v. the Board of Education, for which Green offers a fine précis.
Not surprisingly, this Waterloo for white supremacy received a sharp response from Farmville’s masters, who organized a group calling themselves the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties. They chartered one of the South’s first “segregation academies,” Prince Edward Academy, and simultaneously orchestrated the closure of the school system. They used public funds for tuition grants for white students, and they looted the abandoned facilities, taking “everything but the clocks,” as Robert Taylor later boasted.
Some black students continued their secondary education at a small college across the North Carolina border; a few engaged in ruses to enroll in schools in neighboring counties; others were dispersed to relatives in Northern cities.
Poor white students were victimized, as well. With no schools for their children to attend, parents “ran up debt that would take years to pay back.” While Prince Edward County never experienced the sustained Klan-style violence associated with Southern rural towns like Americus, even moderate dissenters in the white community faced social opprobrium and economic sanction, and some moved away.
By order of the high court, Prince Edward County’s school system reopened in 1964, and in the decades since the Old Dominion has witnessed some profound changes. The Virginia General Assembly created a scholarship program for students who were denied an education during the years of massive resistance. The Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors issued a resolution expressing deep regret for its past actions. Farmville High School’s white enrollment has risen, though not to a level which reflects the county’s demographic balance. Moton High School, where Barbara Johns led the pioneering 1951 revolt, is now the site of Virginia’s only civil rights museum.
One African-American acquaintance of Green’s has spent her life “trying to forgive”; another laments, “They’re just waiting for all of us to die so they can pretend it never happened.” None of what took place in the bad old days can reasonably be considered the author’s fault, but she adamantly rejects any diffusion of historical responsibility, believing that she “can’t be separated from any of it.” Both she and her parents attended the Prince Edward Academy.
As “Something Must Be Done” comes to terms with itself, Green vacillates between hope and depression. “My faith in this community is renewed watching white churches welcome the very people they once excluded.” Nevertheless, she is often forced to ward off pessimism with a sharp stick: “It is an exceedingly slow evolution, growing from a racist place to one that is not. It is an unlearning process that takes generations, a natural progression that still has not been completed, and may not be in my lifetime.”
