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The Defenders called a public meeting to rally white residents around their concept for a separate all-white school system on June 7. More than 1,500 people—nearly all of them white, with the exception of a handful of blacks—packed into Longwood’s Jarman Hall auditorium. Maurice Large, the former chairman of the school board, warned the crowd that “unless there is some change of position on the part of the Board of Supervisors, there will be no schools operated in this county in 1955–56.” Large, also a Defender, gave voice to an idea that had been touted in the Farmville Herald. On the stage, he was surrounded by PTA presidents from each of the county’s white schools.

After J. Barrye Wall presented the Defenders’ proposal to close the schools if the county was ordered to desegregate, the PTA representatives, who also happened to be Defenders, expressed support for starting a private school. The county appeared to have already united around the idea, making parents and community members who disagreed with this approach nervous about expressing themselves.

The outgoing president of Longwood College, Dabney S. Lancaster, stood to speak, warning that integration would “set public education back half a century.” Yet Lancaster, a former state superintendent of instruction, believed that the community “could not afford to close the schools.” After his remarks, a Longwood professor and the Reverend James R. Kennedy, the pastor of the Farmville Presbyterian Church, called for shelving plans to immediately close schools.

James Bash, the principal of Farmville High School, was surprised by the unified stance of the PTA presidents just weeks after the Farmville district PTA had issued a statement opposing private schools. He thought the Defenders had manipulated the meeting to present the appearance of consensus. He raised questions about the logistics of closing the public schools and opening a private school system in its place. Where would classes be held? Who would pay the teachers? Would they lose their retirement funds? “I am a public school man and I cannot take any salary from any organization designed to circumvent the ruling of the Supreme Court,” he told the crowd.

The Farmville High football coach, Robert C. Gilmer III, who would become a legendary figure at the private school, shouted out, “I don’t feel that way. You pay my salary and I will teach your children.” His response was cheered. When another Longwood professor got up to protest the idea of closing the schools, he was booed.

The crowd in attendance voted to establish a nonprofit Prince Edward School Foundation to solicit donations to cover the white public school teachers’ salaries. They hoped this would keep the teachers from looking for jobs outside the county. That night, the Defenders collected $46,000 in pledges. Two days after the meeting, a charter had been set up for the foundation. By midsummer, $180,000 had been pledged. In a July editorial, the Farmville Herald praised the efforts as necessary.

But funds for the private school wouldn’t be needed right away. The Supreme Court’s use of the phrase “all deliberate speed” to stipulate how it expected schools to be desegregated proved to be more ambiguous than the wording in the original decision. The NAACP’s Marshall said the term “all deliberate speed” was code for “S-L-O-W.” Brown II provided legal justification for school districts, including Prince Edward’s, to delay or avoid desegregating for years. On July 18, 1955, a federal court panel ruled that Prince Edward County would not have to desegregate its schools for the new school year and did not set a deadline. For now, the county’s public schools would stay open and segregated.

The newly formed nonprofit held on to its pledge cards should the landscape change. The Defenders knew the threat of desegregation had not disappeared, and they wanted to be ready to launch a white school at a moment’s notice.

The Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors continued to allocate money to the schools on a month-to-month basis rather than at the start of the fiscal year. By doing so, The Farmville Herald explained, the county could simply go “out of the public school business.”

In May 1956, after the NAACP asked the court to order Prince Edward’s schools desegregated, white parents went back to the supervisors to make their position clear. They presented a petition signed by more than four thousand county residents—half the county’s white population. It read:

We, the undersigned citizens of Prince Edward County, Virginia, hereby affirm our conviction that the separation of the races in the public schools of this county is absolutely necessary and do affirm that we prefer to abandon public schools and educate our children in some other way if that be necessary to preserve separation of the races in the schools of this county. We pledge our support of the Board of Supervisors of Prince Edward County in their firm maintenance of this policy.

Virginia’s leaders were also working to support the county. Governor Stanley’s Gray Commission, which consisted exclusively of white male legislators, many of whom represented Southside, concluded in a November 1955 report that segregation was best for both races and that “compulsory integration should be resisted by all proper means in our power.” Blacks would be humiliated sharing a classroom with whites, they determined.

The commission recommended that the state’s school attendance laws be amended to ensure that children were not required to attend integrated schools, that state funds be allocated for tuition grants to families who opposed integrated schools, and that local school boards be authorized to assign white and black children to schools on a student-by-student basis. Later that year, Governor Stanley called the general assembly into special session, seeking a statewide referendum to amend the state constitution in order to allow public funds to go to private schools. In January 1956, voters backed the initiative.

As desegregation suits were filed in other Virginia localities, Harry F. Byrd continued to protest integration, promoting a “Southern Manifesto” that denounced the Supreme Court’s decision as “a clear abuse of judicial power” and discouraged the state from implementing the decision, which he said was “contrary to the Constitution.” He secured the signatures of nearly a hundred Southern congressmen who agreed with him. “I think that in time the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South,” Byrd said.

In Virginia, he was preparing to do even more. With recommendations from the governor’s commission in hand, Byrd crafted a “massive resistance” strategy that became the battle cry of the South, and he met with Stanley and Gray to discuss thirteen proposed bills. The package of laws was approved in August by a narrow margin in a special session of the state assembly. Most extreme was the law that enabled the state to cut off funding and order the closure of any public school that prepared to integrate.

FOR FOUR YEARS FOLLOWING THE Brown decision, Prince Edward County and other localities in the state of Virginia managed to avoid desegregating schools because of the Supreme Court’s failure to address enforcement and the slow pace of the lower courts. Groups like the Defenders had gained traction, in part, because Eisenhower did not publicly support Brown.

However, his administration had not argued against desegregation and had quietly integrated the schools that military children attended. The president also believed that preserving public order was his obligation, prompting him to act in Arkansas in 1957.

In 1955, the local school board in Little Rock had adopted a plan to integrate Central High School. When nine black students prepared to enroll in the all-white high school two years later, Arkansas’s governor, Orval Eugene Faubus, a segregationist, ordered the National Guard to surround the high school, saying “blood will run in the streets” if black students attempted to enter the school. A mob of white people shouted, “Niggers, go home!” as the black students arrived on September 4, and National Guard troops would not allow the black students to pass. As one of the students, Melba Pattillo, tried to flee with her mother, a group of white men, one of them carrying a rope, chased after the pair. Another man swung at the girl with a tree branch.

Eisenhower didn’t want to pick sides, but after the situation had dragged on for days and Little Rock’s mayor, Woodrow Mann, asked for assistance from the White House, the president federalized the National Guard and sent more than one thousand US Army soldiers armed with billy clubs to the school. He went on television to tell the public that he believed it was his “inescapable” responsibility to uphold the Brown ruling and to prevent “mob rule.” The next day, September 25, nine black children walked through the school’s front doors.

Less than a year later, on August 20, 1958, Eisenhower declared it was “the solemn duty” of Americans to comply with the Supreme Court’s order to end racial discrimination in public schools, and he implied he would again use force to integrate the schools if necessary. But when Governor Faubus closed Little Rock’s public schools to prevent their integration a month after Eisenhower’s August speech, the president did not intervene.

Yet Eisenhower’s talk stirred the new governor of Virginia, J. Lindsay Almond Jr., who in his inaugural address in January 1958 had suggested Virginia would fight back. “Against these massive attacks, we must marshal a massive resistance,” he announced. A day after the president’s August comments, Almond called a press conference and told reporters that he would close schools if federal troops were sent in. “There will be no enforced integration in Virginia,” he said.

The Virginia General Assembly had authorized the governor to close any school that came under the protection of the federal troops and to close the rest of the district’s schools, too. As district courts in Virginia began to order desegregation, Almond warned Prince Edward, as well as Charlottesville, Norfolk, and Arlington on September 4 that he would close white schools if blacks were assigned to attend, and he was ready to keep his promise.

On September 15, the governor shut down Warren County High School in Front Royal, located seventy miles west of Washington, DC, and attended by one thousand white students. It became the first school closed under the state’s massive resistance laws after a federal district court judge ordered the admission of twenty-two black students to the school—the county had no black high school—and the judge at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals denied a stay. On September 19, Almond closed a high school and an elementary school in Charlottesville that were preparing to desegregate, shutting out 1,700 children. And on September 27, Almond shut six white schools in the military community of Norfolk, locking out ten thousand children, after a federal judge ordered the schools to be desegregated. When the Norfolk School Board announced that it had assigned seventeen black children to its schools, Almond issued a proclamation within minutes, declaring the Norfolk schools under his control. The governor made use of rights that had been granted to him by the state assembly years earlier in anticipation of this moment.

In the three communities, nearly thirteen thousand students were locked out of school at the end of September, and the response in Virginia was “stunned silence,” the reporter Benjamin Muse reflected later. Some white parents banded together, forming the Virginia Committees for Public Schools to demand that the schools be reopened, and ministerial associations in Norfolk and Front Royal chimed in. The editor of Norfolk’s Virginian-Pilot newspaper, Lenoir Chambers, one of the few Virginia newspaper leaders who publicly opposed the school closures, criticized the decision that locked out or threatened 5,500 children of navy families from all over the country. More than two dozen business leaders pressured the governor to reopen the schools. At the start of the New Year, 1,800 blacks gathered in Richmond to protest the school closings in an eighteen-block march.

Two court decisions on January 19—one from a federal court, the other from the state supreme court—found the massive resistance laws to be unconstitutional and demanded that the schools be reopened. Almond reacted angrily in a radio address on January 20, declaring, “We have just begun to fight.” He said new tools would be sought in legislative session to replace the massive resistance laws that had been struck down.

Addressing “those whose purpose and design is to blend and amalgamate the white and Negro race and destroy the integrity of both races,” “those who don’t care what happens to the children of Virginia,” and “those who defend or close their eyes to the livid stench of sadism, sex, immorality, and juvenile pregnancy infesting the mixed schools of the District of Columbia and elsewhere,” he said, “I will not yield to that which I know to be wrong and will destroy every semblance of education for thousands of the children of Virginia.”

Almond, who once vowed to “cut off my right arm” before allowing a black child to enroll in a white school, later regretted the harsh rhetoric he had directed at blacks. His options had run out, and some saw the speech as his last stand. He quickly realized the futility of his stance and asked the general assembly to repeal the massive resistance legislation, to the bitter disappointment of Byrd and others who did not accept the decision. In February, black students enrolled in white schools in Norfolk and Arlington, just miles from the nation’s capital, without drama or disturbances. This ugly chapter of Virginia’s history seemed to be coming to a close.

Still, Prince Edward remained resolute. The Defenders’ Robert Crawford proclaimed that the whites of the county “are standing just where they were five years ago,” adding “they’re just as firm in their opposition to integration.” As other communities chose to integrate their schools—or at least desegregate classrooms in some schools—rather than sacrifice public education, Prince Edward’s leaders were determined not to give in to the federal government.

After years of avoiding desegregation, Prince Edward’s day of reckoning finally came in May 1959. “The U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals dropped a bombshell on Prince Edward County,” the Farmville Herald proclaimed in a front-page headline. An appellate court reversed a lower court’s decision that the district had until 1965 to desegregate and ordered the schools to take immediate steps to admit qualified black students, noting that the county had not taken a single step toward desegregation. The court set the deadline for September 1959.