Authors: Kristen Green
They are enticing you away from your goal by offering schools, Hill told the assembled parents and children. They are doing this only because either their own schools are failing or they are afraid of the spotlight of public opinion on them now.
He instructed the parents to hold out for integrated schools. All you are losing now is one or two years of basic education, but if you succeed youll get far more than you ever would in Jim Crow schools, Hill told the children and their parents.
Roy Wilkins, the NAACPs executive secretary, told the crowd that the people of Prince Edward County had bowed to the idol of segregation and special privilege.
A few days later, on January 1, 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. raised the issue at the Second Annual Pilgrimage of Prayer for Public Schools. King, an emerging civil rights leader, had in 1954 succeeded Barbara Johnss uncle Vernon Johns as the minister of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery and was the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
In Richmond, about 1,500 blacks had gathered to ask the state assembly to repeal the massive resistance legislation that had stripped localities of the power to assign students to schools and instead had given this power to a board of state appointees. They also asked the general assembly to give Governor Almond emergency authority to reopen the Prince Edward schools. By then several dozen black children were in school with white children at school districts across Virginia.
King, then twenty-six, had been instrumental in the Montgomery bus boycotta protest of racial discrimination on the citys public transit system after Rosa Parkss arrest, and a seminal event in the civil rights movement. He weighed in on the offer by Prince Edwards white leaders to build a private school for black children. I hope these citizens wont sell their birthright of freedom for a mess of segregated pottage, King told the audience gathered at the capitol after walking seventeen blocks from the Mosque theater. I hope they will continue to have the power of endurance… . There can be no growth without pain.
King reflected on the larger civil rights movement. We stand today on the threshold of the most creative period in the nations history in race relations, King said. We stand on the border of the promised land of integration.
He believed the moderation that even President Eisenhower favored was no longer prudent. The president reportedly told a friend in private conversation, months after meeting with King and other black leaders in 1958, that integration should proceed more slowly.
To those who say slow up, I say the hour is late, King told the Richmond crowd. We cant stop because this nation has a date with destiny. Were moving up the highway of freedom to the city of equality.
White leaders announced later in the month that they would delay plans to open the private school for black children until September 1960, saying they were surprised and disappointed with the lack of interest. Hargrove, who believed a number of black parents wanted to enroll their children in the school, accused the NAACP of threatening reprisal to keep black parents from applying on their childrens behalf.
Hill denied Hargroves claim. I think the Negro parents have not been signing up for the schools because they recognize it is simply an effort to preserve segregation, and more and more Negroes are awakening to the fact that segregated facilities are not to their benefit, he said.
The effort to establish Southside Schools was abandoned after only one child applied to attend. But its failure nagged at Harry F. Byrd, the US senator and mastermind of massive resistance. He viewed blacks unwillingness to support the private school as evidence that the NAACP was responsible for keeping black children out of school in Prince Edward. The NAACP is more interested in the integration of public schools than it is in the education of colored children, he said later. The NAACP, alone, is responsible for the fact that 1,700 colored children in Prince Edward County are not now attending good schools with qualified teachers.
THE WHITE ACADEMY HAD BEEN open only a few months when leaders of the Prince Edward School Foundation began working to move the schools out of church basements and into a permanent building. They asked the county school board to sell the closed Farmville High School to the foundation.
B. Blanton Hanbury, the president of the foundation, told the school board that the school buildings were not being used and could not be used in the foreseeable future. The high school building was a liability to the school board, which had to keep it insured and repaired, he argued. You have the basis to sell it, Hanbury told board members. The people of the county dont want integrated schools.
The Farmville Herald supported the idea, too. The paper argued that the foundation and its patrons were the taxpayers who paid for the very building they were asking the school board to sell to them, insinuating that the building belonged to white residents and not to the public. But the school boards leaders feared that if schools were sold, public education in Prince Edward County would never resume.
B. Calvin Basss successor as school board chairman, Lester E. Andrews Sr., opposed selling the school buildings. He and his supporters on the board were now realizing that the board of supervisors and other county leaders considered the schools to be permanently closed unless the Brown decision was miraculously reversed. When pressed to sell Farmville High School in an April 1960 school board meeting, Andrews and four other board members, including Bass, walked out and later resigned their positions. The school board has been guided by the fundamental belief that education must be provided for all the school-age children of the entire county, the resigning members said in a statement.
The Farmville Herald opined that the board had been harassed by court proceedings, referring again to the experiment that the editor believed was in play in Prince Edward. The NAACP, meanwhile, was preparing to file a motion in federal district court in Richmond to force the reopening of the public schools and to prevent the sale of the school buildings. But the school board members resignation had been effective. The leaders of the white school changed course, launching a fund-raising drive and looking for property on which they could build the academy from scratch.
IT DIDNT TAKE LONG FOR them to find a suitable seller: the town of Farmville. Just six months after the private school opened, the foundation bought a thirteen-acre wooded parcel from the town for $2,400. The property at Catlin and Church Streets, on a hill above downtown, was located next to a planned thirty-acre development by the Farmville Memorial Recreation Association.
School leaders launched a $300,000 capital campaignreaching out to the same 2,700 people who had contributed to a $265,000 operating fund the year before. The fund, B. Blanton Hanbury said, was necessary to assure progress in education in Prince Edward County. The Richmond newspapers, which rarely discussed the impact of the closed schools on black children, ran weekly updates on the private schools fund-raising efforts.
Prince Edwards residents and businesses stepped up to give money, as well as labor and materials. By November, all the needed bricks had been donated and a third of the needed cinder blocks had been provided, too. Construction began early the second year of the academys existence.
The high school campus was completed in September 1961, in time for the third year of private school classes. It included twenty-seven classrooms, a library, and a woodworking shop. The buildings were valued at $400,000 but had been built for $256,000.
Tuition, free the first year, was now creeping up. By the end of the first school year, the foundation announced that it would charge tuition for the 19601961 school year$240 for elementary students and $265 for high school students. Parents were expected to be able to access state and county grants to cover the costs.
Some white families couldnt afford it, and their children dropped out. Others were forced to move with their families to neighboring counties. And some ran up debt that would take years to pay back. But these children were scarcely mentioned. In a television interview soon after the white school opened, Roy Pearson denied their existence, insisting that every child who had attended the white public schools was now attending the academy.
BASS, ONE OF FEW TO publicly oppose the school closings, was still looking for a way to get the schools reopened. In November 1959, he began meeting privately, in living rooms across the county, with other concerned businessmen and leaders, including Lester Andrews. Academy officials began referring derisively to the members of the fledgling group as the Bush League, insinuating that its members lacked sophistication. The groups supporters had different ideas about what should be done, but all agreed that they wanted the public schools to be reopened as soon as possible. They were businessmen who saw the school closures as an economic and social disaster for the county. For their desire to provide schools for all county children, they were harassed and called integrationists, the ultimate insult.
Gordon Moss, the associate dean at Longwood, persuaded the group to meet with black leaders. White leaders involved in the discussion suggested a three-year moratorium on school desegregation and proposed that, in exchange, the principles of the Brown decision would be accepted. A biracial committee would be established to move the concept of integration forward. But the suggestions went nowhere.
An all-white group of forty met in June 1960 at a Cumberland County cabin owned by Andrewss business partner, Maurice Large. A Defender, he had stood before the crowd at Jarman Hall years earlier to urge the founding of a private school, but he also wanted the public schools open. At the meeting, the group discussed asking the supervisors to reopen the schools. But news of the meeting had leaked, and segregationists used various means to intimidate those in attendance. When Bass left, a car parked nearby shined its headlights on exiting cars. An academy official reportedly jotted down the names of each person who came and went. Some who attended the meeting reported being followed, even run off the road. Back at the Bass farmhouse in Rice, his wife sat staring out the window, terrified he wouldnt make it home.
The next day, the so-called minutes of the Cumberland meeting were photocopied and distributed around town, listingand embarrassingthose who had attended. Business at Andrews and Larges newly constructed shopping center slowed. Lifelong friends stopped talking. Community leaders would not discuss resumption of schools with anybody, Moss said. And the Bush League never met again.
The opinions of white leaders who believed the public schools should be reopened all but disappeared from public view.
A Bus Ticket and a World Away
Ever since fourteen-year-old Betty Jean Ward could remember, she, her parents, and her siblings gathered around the dinner table each night, talking and laughing and telling stories about their day. Friends filed in and out of the brick house on Main Street in Farmville to hang out with her older brother and sister and to play basketball on the backyard hoop. They were a happy, normal family.
And then they werent.
The summer that the schools closed, Betty Jeans parents, Phillip and Doris, accepted the reality that they wouldnt reopen in the fall. They could see two of the locked and chained schools from their yard. Betty Jeans parents came up with a plan to educate their children that called for sending them in different directions.
They didnt see any alternative, not when they had such big dreams for their kids. They were relieved that, unlike many of their relatives, they had options. Ronnie had only one more year of school before graduation, and Phyllistine, two. Betty Jean wasnt far behind.
Phillip, who, like his father and grandfather, was a baker at Longwood, had completed eleventh grade, a big accomplishment at the time. But his exposure to higher education at Longwood and through family members who had attended college made him expect more of his children. His wife, Doris, had moved from Amelia County to Prince Edward as a teenager to live with a cousin so that she could attend the black high school. After the children were born, Doris commuted to Richmond to attend nursing school so that she could become a licensed practical nurse and provide more income for the family. From the time the children were small, the couple tried to instill in them the value of schooling. Get an education so you can take care of yourself, Phillip told them.
Their eldest son, Gerald, was already in college. Years earlier, the couple had sent him to high school in Washington, DC, where he had lived with a relative. Now he had a football scholarship to attend the historically black Saint Pauls College, an hours drive away in Lawrenceville. The couple decided that Ronnie and Phyllistine would go to Kittrell, which was admitting juniors and seniors and would later take a few sophomores. Betty Jean, who was too young to attend, would live with her maternal grandparents in a neighboring county and enroll in its public schools. She wasnt happy about the news. Why do we have to separate? she asked her parents. A few days later, her brother and sisters bags were packed, and the teenagers left for North Carolina. I just hated to see them go, Betty Jean said.
When school started for Betty Jean in September, her father dropped her off on Sunday nights at Willie and Betty Thompsons home on a tobacco farm twenty minutes outside Farmville. Their eleven kids were already grown, so Betty Jean had her grandparents full attention. In the morning, her grandfather would put her on the tractor and drive her a mile down the road, where shed catch a bus to Luther H. Foster High School in Nottoway County, an hour from her grandparents house. The all-black high school built in 1950 had not yet been integrated. When she returned to her grandparents home in the afternoon, they had snacks waiting for her. On Fridays, one of her parents would fetch her and take her back home to Main Street in Farmville. Some weeks, the Foster principal, who lived in Farmville, would drive her to school so that she could stay with her parents. Dont tell anyone, he instructed her.