A Little Child Shall Lead Them: A Documentary Account of the Struggle for School Desegregation in Prince Edward County, Virginia ed. by Brian J. Daugherity and Brian Grogan

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Little Child Shall Lead Them: A Documentary Account of the Struggle for School Desegregation in Prince Edward County, Virginia ed. by Brian J. Daugherity and Brian Grogan Kevin B. Johnson A Little Child Shall Lead Them: A Documentary Account of the Struggle for School Desegregation in Prince Edward County, Virginia. Edited by Brian J. Daugherity and Brian Grogan. Carter G. Woodson Institute Series. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. xxiv, 263. Paper, $29.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-4272-8; cloth, $59.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-4271-1.) Before federal immigration policy jeopardized child welfare with mass detentions and family separations, the school crisis in Farmville, Virginia, during the 1950s was an origin for present-day austerity politics. Brian J. Daugherity and Brian Grogan have compiled a timely document collection that captures the inception of modern conservatism in rural America, set during the civil rights struggle’s modern phase and white supremacist resistance. African American student activists like Barbara Johns spearheaded fights for quality education in a rigidly segregated rural community. Inspired by teacher Inez Davenport, Johns initiated a 1951 student-led boycott of Robert R. Moton High School; hundreds of black pupils fled “‘tar paper shacks’” and demanded a modern school (p. 34). Included here are a litany of documents emphasizing the local, state, and national developments of central Virginia’s long, complex march toward unitary schooling. The editors have divided the collection into seven chapters along with a prologue—containing the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) opinions and the 1924 Virginia Racial Integrity Act—and an epilogue providing writings on racial reconciliation from the 1990s. The intervening chapters include major sources covering women and the black freedom struggle, resistance to the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, and the inception of dog whistle politics. In 1959 Prince Edward County, Virginia, opted for an “‘extreme step’” by closing all of its public schools, thereby depriving some 2,700 African American children of any form of education for five years (p. 112). Sources for integration in Virginia allow readers to examine the absurdity of segregation; in particular, Edwin B. Henderson’s article from 1957 explains how segregationist policies served white Virginians’ economic interests. “Once segregation is outmoded,” he writes, “educated and intelligent Negroes will become competitors in a free society” for professional employment (p. 104). He likewise notes segregationists’ fears of miscegenation while they ignored the racial intermixing prevalent in the state’s population. [End Page 527] The sources in chapter 4 highlight the national response to such extreme forms of racial conservatism, and the editors introduce the documents with contextual information regarding segregationists’ tactics—vacillating between massive resistance and delay. Once the county board ceased funding public schools, the decision created chaos and upheaval for black and white children. “The entire social fabric of the county was disrupted,” Daugherity and Grogan note (p. 114). White students attended white private academies in basements and movie theaters, while many black children “left the county to live with relatives” (p. 114). The editors’ sources and contextual introductions illuminate an aspect of the civil rights era in which “‘patriotic constitutionalists’” concealed white supremacy in coded policies that ripped children from their rural Virginia community (p. 62). Daugherity and Grogan exemplify this major theme by juxtaposing sources by civil rights attorneys Spottswood W. Robinson III and Oliver W. Hill and segregationists James J. Kilpatrick and Harry F. Byrd Sr., among others. The chronological documentary format makes the work a nice complement to Jill Ogline Titus’s monograph, Brown’s Battleground: Students, Segregationists, and the Struggle for Justice in Prince Edward County, Virginia (Chapel Hill, 2011). Kevin B. Johnson Arkansas State University, Beebe Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association