Prince Edward County Protests Integration with Private Institutions, 1959
From The Wall Street Journal, December 1, 1959.
FARMVILLE, Va.-Three little Negro girls, their twin pigtails knotted with bright red and yellow ribbons, strolled slowly past Farmville's Presbyterian church the other morning. They looked silently as a group of tittering white teenagers hustled into the white-columned building.
Moments later, the white youngsters were hard at work at their new "school." The Negro children traipsed merrily down the street for another day of play. They had no school to go to.
This incident underscored the unique, possibly trend-setting situation here in Prince Edward County as it struggles to maintain its traditional way of segregated schooling.
Prince Edward, a county nearly half populated by Negroes and located deep in southern Virginia's tobacco-rich Piedmont country, has closed its 21 public schools rather than bow to Federal court orders to admit Negro pupils to white classes. It's the nation's first county to go completely out of the public school business. The county has turned to a new system of private all-white schools supported so far by voluntary contributions. Some 1,450 white students are being taught in temporary classrooms set up in churches, business buildings, lodge halls and even a one-time blacksmith shop.
Pioneer Venture
The pioneering venture is being watched with interest throughout the South. If Prince Edward can make a go of private schools, other Dixie "Black Belt" areas will be encouraged to follow suit. If the system doesn't work out, these regions may be less inclined to junk taxpayer-supported education in trying to sidestep court-ordered integration. . . .
The vast majority of white citizens is united behind the private school move. Already the $300,000 goal of voluntary contributions for the first year's operation has been met with pledges and payments. . . .
Effect on Students
There are serious problems to be solved if the new system is to become a fixture. One is Negro schooling. About 1,700 Negroes between the ages of 6 and 18 are receiving no education at all because there are no schools, temporary or otherwise for them.
Seventy Negro children have gone outside the county this year for schooling, 52 of them to the high school division of Kitrell Junior College in North Carolina. As for the rest, a few Negro mothers have tried at-home instruction; but a lack of textbooks and other teaching materials is hampering the attempt. Some of the boys caddy at the Farmville Country Club. Others take their bamboo poles and try to snare catfish in the muddy Appomattox River. But many loiter about the streets of Farmville or play in the countryside.
"The community can't sit idly by while Negro children go uneducated for any long period," says [Prince Edward School] Foundation president Blanton Hanbury, whose lumber products firm employs about 90 Negroes.
Foundation officials have offered to help the Negroes organize their own private schools, but the bids have been spurned. Negro leaders think acceptance would be compromising their contention that the abandonment of public education is illegal. . . .
What prompted the county to go ahead with its private school system, after long consideration, was a directive last May from a Federal appeals court instructing Prince Edward to prepare immediate desegregation plans; in October the Supreme Court upheld the appeals court. Earlier, a district court had given the county until 1965 to start desegregation. But the NAACP challenged this timetable, and won.
Despite its flourishing start, the white school system is bearing its share of problems. A state education administrator in Richmond says he believes the pupils can't be getting as good an education as before. Unsturdy folding chairs are used in many classrooms. Students are crowded in some rooms and thin curtains are the only dividers between certain classes. Lighting still is inadequate in some schools. Many parents have to take their children to school and return to get them at the end of classes because there aren't enough buses. And a few mothers object to the 8:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. classroom schedule without any break for lunch. . . .
The decision last July to go ahead with the private system was greeted with an outpouring of community zest. A group of parents quickly set up a corporation called Patrons, Inc., and bought 17 used school buses. Carpenters and plumbers worked 'round the clock in day and night shifts to install additional toilets, drinking fountains and fire exits. Local Junior Chamber of Commerce members donated ground for a football field and a contractor brought in his bulldozing crew to do the grading. Electrical workers volunteered to put up the light poles for night games. The big lights themselves were donated too.