Chapter 2: Prince Edward County’s Role in Brown v. Board of Education and the Birth of Massive Resistance

This chapter describes how the local civil rights movement in Prince Edward County resisted the deeply entrenched norms of segregation in Southside Virginia established by Senator Harry Byrd’s political machine that mirrored the extremism more commonly attributed to the Deep South in the historiography. A younger generation’s initiative prompted progressive Black leaders in Prince Edward County to formally challenge the “Virginia Way” of segregation through a lawsuit to desegregate schools; this case became one of the five cases that made up the 1954 landmark decision, Brown v. Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in schools was unconstitutional. However, the white leadership of Prince Edward County responded in an extreme manner and ultimately closed the public schools of Prince Edward County for five years. In response to this set-back, the leaders of the civil rights movement of Prince Edward County worked with their counterparts across the South to develop a network of schools for the children of Prince Edward and continued to strategize on how to resist the Virginia Way of segregation. This strategy later paid off in other local movements across Virginia and the South.