Prince Edward County Closed Its Schools Rather Than Integrate Them

In the spring of 1951, a sixteen-year-old junior named Barbara Johns arranged for the principal of Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia, to be called away from the building on a false errand. Then she called the student body to an assembly and asked them to walk out. Moton was the high school for Black students in Prince Edward County. It had been built for far fewer students than it held, and the overflow was taught in tar-paper shacks heated by stoves, while the white high school had the facilities Moton lacked. The students walked out and stayed out, and they asked the NAACP for help. The lawyers who came, Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson, agreed to take the case only if it challenged segregation itself rather than asking for a better segregated school. That case, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, became one of the five decided together as Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Barbara Johns's county had helped end legal school segregation in America. Eight years after her walkout, the same county closed every one of its public schools rather than let Black and white children sit in them together.

In short: After Brown v. Board of Education, Virginia's leaders organized "massive resistance" to integration. In 1959 Prince Edward County stopped funding its public schools entirely, opened a private academy for white children and left most Black children with no school at all for five years, until the Supreme Court ordered the schools reopened in 1964.

How "massive resistance" was built

The Supreme Court decided Brown in May 1954 and issued a second ruling a year later, often called Brown II, telling school districts to desegregate "with all deliberate speed." The phrase gave resisters room, and Virginia's political leadership used it.

The state's dominant political figure, Senator Harry F. Byrd, called for "massive resistance" to integration in 1956, and the term stuck. In Congress that year, most Southern members signed the Southern Manifesto, a statement attacking the Brown decision and pledging to use lawful means to reverse it. In Virginia, the General Assembly passed a package of laws designed to stop integration: a state board that took over pupil assignment, tuition grants to help white families pay for private schools, and a law requiring the governor to close any school that was ordered to integrate.

In 1958, the governor did exactly that, closing schools in Warren County, Charlottesville and Norfolk when federal courts ordered them to admit Black students. Thousands of white students were locked out of their own schools. The backlash among white parents in those communities, many of whom wanted their children in school more than they wanted segregation, was significant.

In January 1959, both the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals and a federal court struck down the school-closing laws. The state's leaders retreated to a policy of limited, slow integration. Massive resistance at the state level was over.

Prince Edward County found another way.

Closing the schools by closing the purse

The county's leaders did not need a state law to close the schools. They simply declined to fund them. In 1959, facing a federal court order to desegregate, the county board of supervisors refused to appropriate money for public schools. The schools did not open that fall. They would not open again until 1964.

The plan had been prepared in advance. White community leaders had organized a private school foundation, and Prince Edward Academy opened for white children, supported by private donations and, before long, by state tuition grants and county tax credits. White children had a school.

Black families were offered a private school of their own, run on the same segregated basis. They refused, understanding that accepting it would undercut the legal case for integration and their children's right to public education.

For most of the county's Black children, the result was no school at all. Some families sent children to relatives in other counties and states. The American Friends Service Committee helped place some students with host families elsewhere. Local churches and community members organized training centers and informal classes to keep children reading. But many children, especially those from poorer families, went years without formal education. Some never returned to school when it reopened. A generation of children in one Virginia county was denied what every other American child was given.

What the county's leaders argued, and why it failed

It is worth stating the defenders' case as they made it, because it was built to sound reasonable. They argued that the Constitution did not require a county to run public schools at all; a county could decide, as a matter of local self-government, to stop. They said they were not discriminating, because the schools were closed to everyone. They said families were free to set up private schools, and the white community had simply done so.

The argument depended on ignoring what was actually happening. The schools were not closed for a neutral reason; they were closed to avoid a court order to integrate. The private academy for white children was supported by public tuition grants and tax credits. And the outcome was not equal: white children were in school, and Black children were not.

The Supreme Court agreed. In Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, decided in May 1964, the Court held that closing the public schools while helping fund private schools for white children denied Black children the equal protection of the laws. Writing for the Court, Justice Hugo Black said what many had been waiting a decade to hear: "The time for mere 'deliberate speed' has run out." The Court said the lower court could order the county to levy taxes to reopen and run the schools.

The schools reopened in the fall of 1964. For years afterward, they were attended overwhelmingly by Black students, while most white families kept their children at the academy.

The free school year and the people who held on

Before the Griffin decision, a stopgap arrived. In 1963, with support from the Kennedy administration and private donors, the Prince Edward Free School Association opened schools for the 1963-64 year, open to all children. Most of the students were Black children who had been out of school for four years. Teachers came from around the country. It was an attempt to give children something while the courts finished their work, and many former students later described that year as the beginning of their return to learning.

The county's Black community had held together through the closure in ways that deserve as much attention as the legal fight. The Rev. L. Francis Griffin, a local minister and NAACP leader, was a steady voice for the boycott of segregated private schools and for the lawsuit that bore his family's name. Parents kept children reading at kitchen tables. Churches opened their doors. Many people who lived through the closure later spoke about it in oral histories collected by local historians and the Robert Russa Moton Museum, now housed in the old school building where Barbara Johns led her walkout.

Barbara Johns herself did not stay in Prince Edward; her family sent her to live with relatives in Montgomery, Alabama, for her safety after the strike. She later became a librarian in Philadelphia and died in 1991. Virginia has since chosen her to represent the state in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol, in place of a statue of Robert E. Lee.

What five years out of school does to a child

It is easy to state the length of the closure and move on. It is worth stopping on what it meant.

A child who was six in 1959 and should have started first grade did not start until she was eleven, unless her family found a way to send her away. A child who was twelve and in the middle of learning algebra lost the thread entirely and came back at seventeen, often too old to sit in a classroom with younger students and too far behind to catch up quickly. Teenagers who would have graduated went to work instead. Some of them never earned a diploma.

Reading is built in sequence, and a gap of years in the early grades does not simply pause learning; it can make every later step harder. Former students later described the embarrassment of returning to school as teenagers who could barely read, the strain of trying to catch up, and the anger of knowing that white children in the same county had never missed a day.

The damage was not only academic. Families were split up when parents sent children to live with relatives in other places so they could go to school. Some children went north and never moved back. Communities lost young people. And the economic effect followed those children for the rest of their lives, because education shapes earnings, health and the chances a parent can give the next generation.

There is no clean way to measure what was taken from those students, and the people who lived it are better witnesses than any statistic. Their oral histories, many preserved by the Moton Museum, are the best record of what a county decided to do to its own children.

Repair, of a kind

Virginia was slow to acknowledge what happened. In 2003 the General Assembly passed a resolution expressing regret for the closing of the schools. In 2004 the state created the Brown v. Board of Education Scholarship Program, which offers scholarships to people whose education was interrupted by school closings during massive resistance, and to some of their descendants. It was partly funded with a donation from a private philanthropist.

The program was modest. Many of the people it was meant to help were by then in middle age or older, and some had built lives without the education they were denied. But it was an admission, in law, that the state and the county had done real harm to real people, and that repair was owed.

The academy that opened for white children in 1959 later changed its name and admitted students of all races. The county's public schools today serve students of every background. The building where it began is a museum. Change came, and it came at a cost borne mostly by children.

Why this belongs in the debate about schools now

The Prince Edward story is not only history. It bears on questions about public education that are live today.

The most basic is whether public schools are a public obligation. The county's leaders argued that local government could simply stop funding schools. The Court rejected that when closing schools was a way to evade integration, but the broader idea, that public education is something a community may choose to withdraw from, comes back in debates over school funding, vouchers and private school tax credits.

Here is the argument I would make, labelled as opinion. Supporters of school choice today are not segregationists, and most of them would be appalled by what happened in Prince Edward. Many are parents trying to get their own children into a better school, which is entirely understandable. But the history should make all of us careful about programs that move public money to private schools without the obligations that come with public education: accepting every child, serving students with disabilities, being accountable to the public. In Prince Edward, tuition grants were the mechanism of exclusion. Public dollars should come with public duties.

There are also lessons about who bears the cost when adults fight. The Prince Edward closure was a political struggle among grown-ups over law and power. The people who paid were children who lost years of learning they could never get back. That is worth remembering in every school funding fight. The education page on this site follows those debates.

What you can do

The fight over Prince Edward was won by students, parents, ministers and lawyers who refused to accept what was done to their children. Here is where you can pick up the thread.

• Show up for your public schools. School board meetings decide budgets, curricula and how schools serve every child. Find your local races and registration rules on the voting page, which covers deadlines and voting options in every state.
• Watch the courts. The Supreme Court continues to hear cases about public money, religious schools and civil rights in education. The court watch page tracks this term's opinions with the Court's own summaries.
• Support education and civil rights groups. The organizations directory lists civil rights and education nonprofits in every state.
• Ask your representatives about school funding. Find your state and federal lawmakers through the representatives lookup and ask how they would make sure public money for schools comes with public obligations.
• Follow the wider story. The racial justice page collects coverage on civil rights history and the present-day fights it shapes.

A sixteen-year-old walked her classmates out of a crowded school because she believed they deserved better. It took thirteen years, a Supreme Court case and a lost generation of schooling for her county to agree.