“The Issue Is the Control of Public Schools”: The Politics of Desegregation in Prince Edward County, Virginia

Abstract

issue is not people versus public schools ... issue is control of public schools. question is: Will public education be controlled by people who pay for it, or by fideral courts, which under pressure of organized minorities threaten to dominate it? --J. Barrye Wall, The True Story of Prince Edward (1) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Before a packed crowd of over 700 parents, teachers, and students, R. R. Moton High School alumnus Willie Shepperson revealed high stakes involved with public school desegregation. At April 28, 1969, Prince Edward County school board meeting, he outlined county's troubling educational and racial history and assured school officials that blacks, like whites, did not want interracial marriage. Instead, he argued, the issue is equalization. Shepperson's pronouncement was a step forward from earlier NAACP equalization suits of 1930s and 1940s, in which lawyers pushed federal courts to uphold aspect of separate but equal by equalizing material resources. Integration held more promise for African Americans' full participation in educational decision-making by enabling them to operate outside of Jim Crow racial geographies and power structures. To Shepperson and other Prince Edward County parents, this articulation of equality signaled a shift from a focus on racial integration to something more desirable: power to determine their children's education. Warning school officials that blacks were being pushed to limit, Shepperson implored school board to act quickly to right racial wrongs done so consistently in county. (2) central issue, in what Moton High School principal Alfred O. Hosley called the straw that broke camel's back, was firing of popular white English teacher Thomas Burwell (T. B.) Robinson Jr. In minds of African American community, Robinson's immediate dismissal without just cause opened door to a host of other examples of an uneven balance of power in school decision-making--including hiring and firing of teachers, curricular choices, and resource allocation. Speaking to a growing sense of political and educational empowerment, Shepperson powerfully communicated to Prince Edward County school board black students' demands for African American control over school policies and hiring procedures. (3) Like Shepperson, newspaper editor and publisher J. Barrye Wall realized significance of who controlled public schools. Wall used Farmville Herald to promote racial segregation. He argued that whites did not oppose public education of blacks; they opposed that the Negro children of Prince Edward are suffering fate of being pawns in hands of pressure politicians, more intent upon integrating races, thereby stirring racial tensions, than in educating and developing Negro people. Of county's 14,379 residents, sixty-three percent were white and thirty-seven percent were African American. Yet public schools remained over 97 percent black, illuminating a huge disparity between county population and public school representation. It was no surprise that heated debates over how school decisions would be made, and by whom, would mark subsequent years of school desegregation, and they would call into question roles of power and choice across changing racial landscape of South. (4) Prince Edward County epitomized importance of racial politics in field of public education. In 1951, a Moron High School strike, led by sixteen-year-old Barbara Rose Johns, drew public attention to conditions in overcrowded and grossly underfunded black segregated high school. Refusing to change its Jim Crow schools, all-white school board stalled any financing of school improvements. Black students and parents signed a petition making Prince Edward one of five communities that composed NAACP-sponsored Brown v. …