Prince Edward County Virginia Closes Entire Public School System for Five Years Rather Than Integrate

On June 26, 1959, the Prince Edward County, Virginia Board of Supervisors refused to appropriate funds to the County School Board, effectively closing the entire public school system rather than comply with federal court orders to integrate. This action represented the most extreme manifestation of Virginia’s “Massive Resistance” campaign, led by Senator Harry Byrd, to defy the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. Prince Edward County became the only school district in the entire nation to resort to such drastic measures, closing its public schools for five full years. The county used state tuition grants to establish private academies for white children while leaving approximately 1,700 Black children without any access to education.

Prince Edward County was the site of one of the five cases consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education. In 1951, Barbara Johns had led Black students at Moton High School in a walkout to protest overcrowded conditions and inadequate facilities compared to the white high school. When ordered by federal courts on May 1, 1959, to integrate, county officials chose to abandon public education entirely. The state of Virginia provided tuition grants and tax credits to support the Prince Edward Academy and other private schools that excluded Black students, essentially using public funds to maintain segregation through privatization. The Virginia General Assembly had passed laws specifically enabling this approach as part of the Massive Resistance infrastructure. Meanwhile, Black children were left without schools—some received makeshift education in church basements, others traveled out of state to live with relatives and attend school, but many missed years of education entirely.

The Prince Edward County school closings lasted until 1964, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Griffin v. School Board of Prince Edward County that the closures violated students’ constitutional rights and ordered the schools reopened. In 1963, the Prince Edward Free School was established with support from the Kennedy administration and civil rights organizations, providing education to approximately 1,500 students including a handful of white students, but this addressed only a fraction of the educational loss. President John F. Kennedy referenced the situation in a February 1963 speech to Congress about civil rights, highlighting it as an example of institutional extremism. The Virginia General Assembly did not formally apologize until 2003, and in 2004 the state established a scholarship fund for those who lost educational opportunities. The closures demonstrated how state and local governments could weaponize their control over public services—using budgetary authority, taxation policy, and regulatory power—to resist federal court orders and deny constitutional rights. The willingness to sacrifice the education of an entire generation of children, both Black and white (though white families had state-funded alternatives), revealed the depths of institutional commitment to preserving segregation and the authoritarian impulse underlying Massive Resistance: when faced with a choice between integration and abandoning core governmental functions, Virginia officials chose abandonment, establishing a precedent for institutional destruction as a tool of resistance to civil rights that presaged later efforts to privatize and defund public institutions rather than ensure equal access.