Prince Edward County Virginia Closes All Public Schools for Five Years Rather Than Integrate

In June 1959, the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors votes not to appropriate any money to operate public schools, choosing to close all public schools rather than comply with federal desegregation orders. The public schools in Prince Edward County remain closed from 1959 to 1964—the only school district in the country to resort to such extreme measures.

Prince Edward County had been the site of Virginia’s first direct legal challenge to school segregation when, in April 1951, a student-led strike protesting the poor quality of the Black Moton High School resulted in the Davis et al. v. County School Board of Prince Edward County case, which was grouped with similar cases under Brown v. Board of Education. After the January 1959 court decisions that overturned Virginia’s massive resistance laws, most Virginia localities began slow compliance. But in Prince Edward County, as one historian notes, “it appeared that massive resistance was reaching its end, but in Prince Edward it was just beginning.”

For five years, white students in the county attend private, all-white “segregation academies” hastily established and funded by state tuition grants and private donations. Black students in Prince Edward County have to go to school elsewhere or forgo their education altogether. Some get schooling by living with relatives in nearby communities or at makeshift schools the community creates in church basements. Others are educated out of state with funds raised by groups such as the Quakers. An entire generation of Black children—more than 1,700 students—are denied education.

In 1963, federal district courts order the public schools to open; Prince Edward County appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court. On May 25, 1964, the Court unanimously rules in Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County that Prince Edward County’s actions violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, finally forcing the schools to reopen in fall 1964.

According to Larissa Smith Fergeson, associate professor of history at Longwood University, “In many ways, Prince Edward County was the last stand of Massive Resistance in the state of Virginia.” The five-year closure represents the most extreme example of a governmental entity willing to completely eliminate a core public service—public education for all children—rather than comply with constitutional requirements for racial equality.

The Prince Edward County case establishes the outer limits of how far state and local governments can go in resisting federal civil rights enforcement, but it also demonstrates the template that is later adapted in more subtle forms: defunding public institutions while providing public subsidies for private alternatives that can maintain de facto segregation. This strategy of “starving the beast” of public institutions while channeling public money to private alternatives becomes a core conservative movement tactic applied to public education (vouchers, charter schools), social services (privatization), and regulatory agencies (budget cuts, staff reductions).