Brown's Battleground: Students, Segregationists, and the Struggle for Justice in Prince Edward County, Virginia

Abstract

The tragic history of the school crisis in Prince Edward County, Virginia, is well known and has been told most effectively by Richard Kluger in his magisterial Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality (1976), and by Amy E. Murrell in her outstanding essay “The ‘Impossible’ Prince Edward Case: The Endurance of Resistance in a Southside County, 1959–64” (Matthew D. Lassiter and Andrew D. Lewis, eds., The Moderates' Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia, 1998). In the excellent Brown's Battleground, Jill Ogline Titus looks beyond the contours of the familiar legal and political narrative to focus instead on the determined yet often futile and heartbreaking efforts of black parents and a handful of white supporters to overcome fierce resistance from white segregationists and ensure a modicum of justice for their children. Titus faithfully covers the most familiar aspects of the story—a 1951 student strike that led to a landmark Supreme Court decision announced along with Brown v. Board of Education (1954), followed by the unconscionable decision of the county's whites in 1959 to close their entire public school system rather than allow token integration—but wisely devotes only a brief introduction and a single chapter to them. (The opening line of the introduction, “The fiddler came to Farmville in 1951, demanding payment for generations of neglect,” perfectly sets the tone for the rest of the book [p. 1].)