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Wearing a new hat and purse, Tina Land joined a group walking toward the Farmville Baptist Church, the same church where my grandparents worshipped. As they made their way down the street, Land noticed police cars and officers who had been tipped off about the group’s plans. The students who had been turned away from the Methodist churches joined the young people walking to Farmville Baptist, and by the time they arrived, the crowd had grown to several dozen. A leader of the group went to the front door and knocked, and the owner of a local business answered. Robert Burger, who owned a funeral home, also met the students at the door. “What are y’all doing down here?” the first businessman asked, standing army style, legs separated with his arms behind his back. “You got your own churches. You’re not coming up in here.”

“Well, we will pray here and sing freedom songs right here,” Williams responded.

White churchgoers arriving late were directed to enter through a side door as Williams led the students in prayer and sang “We Shall Overcome” on the front steps.

Inside Farmville Baptist Church, where my grandparents sat on a pew near the rear of the church with their three children every Sunday, the service was already under way. The chanting and singing from the front of the church was so loud that a choir member seated directly behind the minister couldn’t hear him. Police officers soon arrived.

“If you don’t leave, we’re going to arrest you,” the officers told the young people.

The students sat down on the front steps, and some of them responded, “Arrest us.” The Farmville police officers ordered the students into the cruisers, telling them that they were under arrest.

“The only way you’re going to move us is you have to lift us,” the students responded, and then went limp. Betty Jean was chubby, and it took four officers to pick her up by the arms and legs and lift her into the station wagon. She didn’t say a word. An officer told Tina to get up and walk to his police car. “You want to take me, you’re going to have to take me some other way,” she told him. “I’m not going to walk.”

“I was carried by my arms, I was carried by my feet, and I was actually dragged,” she said.

Williams was the only demonstrator who walked to the police car. He was taken to a holding cell at the Farmville Jail. “We didn’t care if we went to jail or not, because King had taught us that it is good to go to jail for a just cause,” Williams said, recalling the civil rights leader’s words at Shaw University.

Burger, the chairman of the church’s board of deacons, signed the warrant for charges of interfering with worship services. Ivanhoe Donaldson, a field worker for SNCC of New York who had also been in Danville, was among those arrested. Most of the demonstrators were rolled on stretchers to the police station around the corner.

The students had warned their parents that they might be taken into police custody before they left home that morning. Don’t come and get us, they had instructed their parents. The students wanted to be locked up in order to attract media attention. But when the police started calling parents of the children who were under eighteen, threatening to send them to different counties, parents like Betty Jean’s headed down to the police station to pick them up.

Deputy Jack Overton, the brother of Farmville Police Chief Otto Overton and the future county sheriff, went to Williams’s cell and told him that Griffin was there to see him. Williams didn’t believe Overton—he thought he was about to be beaten. Downstairs, deputy sheriffs from neighboring Lunenburg County were waiting to transport him to their jail—out of sight of reporters, who had gotten word that students and organizers were in custody. Williams was loaded into a sheriff’s car and driven down Main Street in Farmville. He waved to a woman he knew from the back of the cruiser and she immediately alerted Griffin.

Over the weekend the police had arrested thirty-three demonstrators, twenty-five of whom were juveniles released to their parents. In preparation, white officials had requested space in eight surrounding counties’ jails, enough “to house every citizen of Prince Edward County, Negro and white, including horses, cattle and dogs,” one black county leader noted. More than a dozen young men had also been deputized to help law enforcement officers.

It took nearly a week for Williams to be bailed out of jail. He was sentenced to twelve months in prison for interrupting and disturbing an assembly met for the worship of God. But the sentence was appealed and Williams did not return to jail.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Prince Edward County’s black residents believed they had a friend in President Kennedy.

When the schools closed, Virginia legislators and congressmen turned their backs on the black residents of Prince Edward County. And President Eisenhower had seemed to pay little attention to the shuttering of schools and its effect on black students. Although the president acknowledged in correspondence with a Charlottesville parent deep regret that the schools were closed and said the impact on children could be “disastrous,” he never offered to intervene in Prince Edward.

Black county residents had all but given up on their local representatives, but they hoped the next president would step in. During the 1960 presidential campaign, Griffin wrote letters to both candidates, Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon, asking them how they planned to address the situation in Prince Edward. “This little Virginia community has defied the courts and violated every principle of democracy. Strong federal intervention is needed to save us from ourselves and guarantee our children a fair chance in an ever-changing world,” Griffin wrote.

“If you are elected as president of this great nation of ours, will you advocate measures to prevent this from happening to other children of the nation?” Griffin wanted to know. “Will you use the powers of this great office to correct this evil that is negatively affecting the lives of approximately 1,400 white and 1,700 Negro children, and by tomorrow could affect the lives of untold numbers of the South?”

More than 70 percent of blacks around the country voted for Kennedy, helping him to win the election.

Soon after Kennedy took office in January 1961, he expressed public support for Brown and denounced the school closings. His administration wanted to help the children of Prince Edward, but without clear authority for the federal government to enforce the Brown decision, the Department of Justice needed to be invited by a federal judge to join a school desegregation case as a friend of the court, not a party to the action.

Months after taking office, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy found a way around the friend of the court requirement. In April 1961, the Department of Justice filed a motion in federal district court to intervene in the Prince Edward suit as a party plaintiff, in an attempt to expand the NAACP’s complaint. In its first school desegregation case, the department asked the federal court to add the Commonwealth of Virginia, the comptroller of Virginia, and the Prince Edward School Foundation as defendants. It also asked the court to order Virginia to withhold state money for all schools—and for tuition grants—until the Prince Edward schools were reopened.

Segregationists quickly denounced the Department of Justice’s request to join the lawsuits. The Prince Edward Defenders held a rally attended by 250 people and adopted a resolution calling the department’s move “totalitarianism.” Congressman Watkins M. Abbitt of Appomattox, a member of Byrd’s close circle of advisers who had once referred to the Brown decision as the “naked and arrogant declaration of nine men,” said the department had usurped its powers. Senator Byrd suggested that the Kennedy administration was penalizing the whole state in order to punish one locality.

The Kennedys did not relent under the criticism. Bobby Kennedy questioned the morality of closing the schools and accused Prince Edward of circumventing federal courts. He promised to act if that claim were found to be true. “We will not stand by or be aloof,” he said in a May 1961 speech at the University of Georgia. “We will move.”

But the Kennedy administration would have to find another path. Federal Judge Oren R. Lewis denied the Department of Justice’s motion to intervene, finding that doing so without clear legislation would defy Congress. Black leaders’ hopes for quick action by the new president had been dashed. Lewis’s decision implied that the executive branch of the federal government was powerless to reopen the schools.

It already seemed that the state had no power—or no will—to act. During his gubernatorial campaign, Albertis S. Harrison Jr. had advocated reopening the schools even though he was responsible for defending massive resistance as attorney general. But since his 1962 swearing-in as governor, Harrison had taken no action in Prince Edward. His failure to act led many to believe that the state could not intervene to assist the county’s black students while the case was in the federal courts.

The Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors could have reopened the schools at any point. But each year when the issue came before the board, its members voted not to levy taxes, effectively keeping the schools closed. After the Bush League stopped meeting, public calls to reopen the schools came primarily from the black community.

The Kennedy administration focused its attention on voting rights after being turned away from the Prince Edward case and soon had to address violence and protests that were erupting farther South.

In May 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality led a group of thirteen black and white volunteers from Washington, DC, into the South on a pair of Greyhound and Trailways buses. Some whites sat in the back and some blacks in the front, testing whether buses and station facilities had complied with Supreme Court rulings that called for integrated interstate travel, including lunch counters, waiting rooms, and restrooms at bus stations.

The lawsuit had originated in Virginia. The NAACP had taken up the case of Irene Morgan, who had been arrested in July 1944 by the sheriff of Middlesex County for refusing to give up her seat on a Greyhound bus. In June 1946, the Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation on interstate buses was a violation of the interstate commerce clause. In December 1960, Boynton v. Virginia had expanded the ruling, prohibiting segregation in waiting rooms and restaurants at bus stations, but both decisions were largely ignored in the South.

The Freedom Riders—the individuals testing the laws—stopped in Prince Edward County on their route. They found that the “Colored” signs at the Farmville bus station had been painted over, and all thirteen riders were served. They left Prince Edward unscathed, but as the buses traveled farther south and new passengers boarded, the Freedom Riders experienced growing hostility. They were arrested in North Carolina and beaten in South Carolina. In Anniston, Alabama, a crowd of fifty surrounded the bus with encouragement from a Ku Klux Klan member. Holding chains, clubs, and metal pipes, the crowd slashed the bus’s tires and broke windows before the police arrived. After the bus was escorted out of town by the police, it hobbled to a stop six miles beyond the town limits as its tires went flat. A mob surrounded the Greyhound bus, rocking the bus in an attempt to flip it. Someone threw a bomb inside, while another held the doors shut to keep passengers inside and screamed, “Burn them alive!” and “Fry the goddamn niggers!” As passengers escaped the burning vehicle, they were beaten with baseball bats. In response, rioting broke out in Birmingham and Montgomery. When the Trailways bus arrived in Birmingham, its passengers were attacked by another Klan mob.

Over the course of the protest, four hundred people participated in the Freedom Rides, many of whom were imprisoned. After continued rioting and mounting arrests, the Interstate Commerce Commission in September 1961 ordered the desegregation of interstate travel at the request of Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

The following year, James H. Meredith Jr., a black air force veteran, attempted to enroll in the University of Mississippi after a court ordered he be admitted. President Kennedy intervened when Governor Ross Barnett blocked Meredith’s path. Federal marshals and Department of Justice lawyers accompanied Meredith to campus—he was dropped off by a border patrol plane—so that he could register for classes, ending segregation at the university. The president sent twenty-three thousand Mississippi National Guard troops to the campus. Riots broke out, with youth throwing bottles and rocks and setting fires. Two men died and 375 were injured in the violence. Meredith was guarded around the clock and escorted from building to building.

It seemed to blacks in Farmville that, with headline-grabbing racial violence farther south, Kennedy had forgotten about their children. But, as time wore on, it became clear that the president was growing increasingly frustrated with the county’s closed schools. “Prince Edward’s educational wasteland troubled the consciences of many Americans, particularly President Kennedy,” Newsweek wrote.

Just before Christmas 1962, the Department of Justice joined the NAACP as a friend of the court in a filing with the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to “order the schools opened promptly without racial segregation” in Prince Edward. Bobby Kennedy argued that the federal courts had the power to require the county to levy taxes to operate desegregated public schools.

But many in Prince Edward were tired of Kennedy’s legal focus and wanted him to take action instead. Late in 1962 and into 1963, Griffin coordinated with other agencies to petition the administration to do more. Finally the national NAACP asked Kennedy to put together a remedial program for Prince Edward’s children.

At the beginning of the New Year, matters were escalating in the South. When George C. Wallace delivered his inaugural address as Alabama’s governor in January 1963, the streets of Montgomery were packed with his supporters, some of whom wore white flowers symbolizing their commitment to white supremacy. Blacks were not welcome at the public event. Wallace pledged, in a vehement speech written by a Ku Klux Klansman, to protect the state’s “Anglo-Saxon people” from “communist amalgamation” with blacks.