Prince Edward County Public Schools

Prince Edward County Public Schools. Farmville, Virginia. In 1954, after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka that American schools must integrate, Senator Harry S. Byrd and several Virginia governors followed the policy of "massive resistance." Integration was postponed in every way possible, from legal manipulation to simple foot-dragging. In many counties the boards of supervisors, school boards, and other government bodies managed to postpone integration for as long as 15 years. In Prince Edward County, the governing bodies simply closed the schools altogether from 1959 to 1964, rather than complying with the mandate to integrate. White children could attend the newly established Prince Edward Academy. However, many white families couldn't afford or did not feel it was necessary to go to the Academy, and their children received no education. For Black children, a number of "training schools" were set up in churches, homes, and buildings to provide them with a rudimentary education. They were often taught by unpaid, untrained teachers, as salaried teachers went elsewhere looking for work. An organized effort led by Farmville's First Baptist and Beulah AME churches resulted in the so-called "Free Schools," in which student volunteers came to town to teach and live with local Black families. In other cases, many children , Black and white , were sent by their parents to live in other counties with friends or relatives to get an education. Others continued working on farms, expecting that the situation would not last longer than a year or so. As a result, many of Prince Edward's youth were denied years of education during the civil rights movement. Members of the "Lost Generation," as it has been called, received an education that was interrupted or never completed. After the schools reopened in 1964, extensive improvements gradually resulted in a 135-acre campus with three schools that provide the county's diverse student population with a quality education.