47 pages • 1 hour read
Kristen GreenSomething Must Be Done About Prince Edward County
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 3-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Prince Edward Joins Brown v. Board of Education”
This long chapter summarizes the Prince Edward County school controversy that led to the closing of the public schools. It begins in 1951, when the county was completely segregated; black and white students attended separate schools.
The black school, built in 1939, soon became overcrowded. In little more than a decade, Green writes, “a school that was originally constructed for 180 students was squeezing 477 into its eight classrooms” (38). Despite pleas at school board meetings, the county refused to do anything until 1948, when a few classrooms were added on to the existing building. These additions, Green writes, looked like chicken coops; they were constructed out of tar paper and heated in winter with potbelly stoves burning coal. The effort was inadequate. Classes continued to be held in the auditorium, outside in nice weather, and even in parked school buses. Meanwhile, the white students had a brick school with plenty of room and many amenities.
In 1951, a junior at the all-black Moton High School led an effort to change education inequity in Farmville that would have far-ranging consequences. Barbara Johns knew that the adults’ efforts to secure a new school for black students had failed. She thought a student strike would have more of an impact. On April 23, a false report to the school office about students making trouble downtown drew the principal out of the building, and Johns and her group sprang into action. They sent notes to all the classrooms announcing an emergency assembly in the auditorium. Johns then announced that the meeting was for students only and asked the teachers to leave. The students gathered in the auditorium responded eagerly to Johns’ ideas, and the assembly ended with students marching outside, carrying signs. News of the event spread quickly. Reverend L. Francis Griffin, a young minister at Lancaster’s church and also head of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) offered his help. He advised the students to contact the Richmond chapter of the NAACP, where lawyer Oliver Hill Sr. worked on desegregation cases. At first, Hill rebuffed the students, but he later agreed to meet with them and their parents.
In the meantime, the student protestors met with the school superintendent, T. J. McIlwaine regarding the inequity of Farmville’s black high school. First he told them that the black and white schools were equal, which was patently false. He said the matter was out of his hands, as any changes would require a vote by the citizens. Then he grew angry, threatening them with expulsion. The students “stomped out of the meeting, unsatisfied” (45).
When the students met finally with Hill, they persuaded him to take their case. He agreed on one condition: that they fight to integrate the town’s public schools, not to build a new black school.
This tactic represented a recent change at the NAACP’s national level. Under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall, the organization concluded that the entire system of segregation was unconstitutional and sought to overturn the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that established the precedent of “separate but equal” facilities. Two important cases involving university segregation had been won in 1950, but not much headway had been made in secondary education, and the NAACP was seeking cases.
The Farmville students, who just wanted better facilities for their local school, hesitated. When they voted on Hill’s offer, the proposal to accept passed by just one vote. Black parents were concerned about the dangers of challenging segregation, especially the possibility of violence, but a state NAACP representative present told them that a new school would not solve the problem: “There is no such thing as separate but equal,” he said (48). In the end, the parents supported the effort, and the students returned to school.
Hill’s law firm appealed to the Prince Edward County’s school board to end its racial segregation policy. When the board refused, the NAACP filed suit in federal court on behalf of 117 black families. Immediately, the school board reversed course and offered to build a new school. Though the families refused to drop the case, the board went ahead, opening a new $875,000 school in 1953 with space for 700 students—proof, the white community leaders claimed, that they supported black education.
As the case continued, a US district court ruled against the NAACP. Upon appeal to the Supreme Court, lawyers combined the original case with four others that also involved racial desegregation. Together, these cases came to be known as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The case was argued in late 1952 and then again, due to delays, in December 1953. The Supreme Court declared in May 1954 that segregated schools were unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. However, and importantly to this story, the court outlined neither a time frame nor a methodology for implementing school integration.
Chapter 4 Summary: “My Family’s Part”
In this chapter, Green and her family are living in Richmond, and she’s working as a reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Her family’s transition from Massachusetts to Virginia has been a little rocky, with racial issues arising from time to time. A friend, for example, cautions against shopping at a “ghetto” supermarket nearby—using that term, Green guesses, because some people who are poor and black shop there. Then, out of nowhere, Green learns she has stage one breast cancer. Once surgery and treatment are behind her, Green quits her job to focus solely on her research about Prince Edward County: “free, empowered even, to pursue this story that has nagged at me for so long” (58).
Green picks up the town’s story immediately following the 1954 Brown decision. The reaction in the South was immediate and aggressive, with white politicians and community leaders vowing to fight integration. One exception was Virginia’s governor, Thomas B. Stanley, who initially pledged to go along with the decision and work prudently with people of both races to find a solution. He made an about-face, however, after severe backlash from whites, vowing, “I shall use every legal means at my command to continue segregated schools in Virginia” (60).
Prince Edward County reacted the same way. The community harbored a deep mistrust of the federal government that traced back to the Civil War. Founded in 1754, the county was, according to Green, an “agricultural oasis” (61). Black slaves, along with some indentured servants and free whites, provided labor, increasing in number as labor-intensive tobacco farming became dominant. The town of Farmville was founded in 1798 and became one of the select locations for inspecting tobacco; by the mid-19th century, it was the fourth largest market in the state. During the Civil War, the county supplied men and opened a hospital for soldiers, but no battle was fought there until the very end: Robert E. Lee lost almost a quarter of his men in a battle with Ulysses S. Grant, only two days before he surrendered at Appomattox. Union soldiers remained in the area for weeks, leaving the local residents with a longstanding bitterness toward the federal government.
Because of Prince Edward County’s involvement in the landmark case, many anticipated that it would be among the first to integrate. Thus, local opponents to integration mounted a robust defense right away. Leading the cause was the editor and publisher of the Farmville Herald, J. Barrye Wall, who used the paper’s editorial pages to argue the cause of continued segregation, which he claimed was “in the best interest” of everyone and had “brought phenomenal developments into the South” such as industrial progress (64).
Green writes that she always assumed Prince Edward Academy’s founding was motivated by the public school closings, but her research reveals that was not the case. Shortly after the Brown decision, Wall and other white county leaders formed the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties, to counter the NAACP and take up the cause of segregation. The organization committed itself to defending state rights, especially on the issue of schools: Any schools forced to integrate would receive no funding and would, if necessary, be closed down. Within one year, the Defenders had 12,000 members in Virginia. Green learns that her grandfather was a member of the Farmville chapter and feels guilty about her family’s direct role in the school closings.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Locked Out”
Chapter 5 continues the story of how the Brown decision played out in Prince Edward County. The main point of contention was how soon integration had to be implemented. And President Eisenhower’s tepid response—he never publicly endorsed Brown—indicated to some in the South that they could get away with a lengthy delay. A year after the decision, in early 1955, the Supreme Court issued a follow-up directive that integration should proceed “with all deliberate speed” (74). Assuming that meant the schools were to be integrated that fall, the Defenders asked the Prince Edward County school board not to fund the public schools. When the county learned that integration could be put off another year, the board funded the schools, but only for the minimum amount required by law.
In June 1955, a group of white leaders formed the Prince Edward School Foundation to make plans for a whites-only private school—and then announced those plans at a community meeting. The majority of the crowd was in favor, voting to establish a Prince Edward School Foundation to collect donations. That night, $46,000 was pledged to cover teachers’ salaries, a number that grew to $118,000 by the middle of the summer.
In July, however, a court ruled that Prince Edward County would not have to integrate its schools that fall and offered no further deadline for a policy change. At the same time, the state of Virginia acted to thwart desegregation by introducing a referendum, passed by voters in early 1956, that would allow private schools to use public funds. Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd led an effort known as “massive resistance,” adopted throughout the South, in which he initiated no less than 13 bills designed to fight integration, all of which passed.
Threats of violence forced Eisenhower to act in 1957 when the Little Rock, Arkansas public high school prepared to enroll black students: He nationalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent in Army troops to protect the students and maintain peace. A year later, Eisenhower implored all Americans to comply with desegregation. In response, Virginia Governor J. Lindsay Almond prepared to close schools if federal troops arrived to force integration.
Throughout September 1958, Almond closed schools with the authority given him by the “massive resistance” legislation. However, in early 1959, two court decisions declared this legislation unconstitutional, and the state’s schools were ordered to reopen. In February, some black students enrolled without incident in schools in two cities, and integration seemed to be finally on its way. Prince Edward County, however, stood firm when, in May 1959, a court ordered that it desegregate its schools that fall. The county shuttered the public schools, locking out all 3,000 students.
Chapters 3-5 Analysis
Green’s grandfather, Papa, plays a pivotal, underlying role in these chapters. In Chapter 4, the author presents the statewide reaction to the Brown decision, along with some county history as background and context. And she describes the community’s overwhelming opposition to desegregation, to some extent positioning her grandfather as typical of his time and place. Still, she is shocked to learn that her beloved Papa was a founding member of the Defenders, the group formed ostensibly to protect state rights and individual liberties but in effect to fight for continued racial segregation. This discovery tells her in no uncertain terms that Papa was a leader in the movement, not a follower, and forces her to face her family’s role in the harm that resulted from the school closings.
In Chapter 5, Green must also face new knowledge about the founding of all-white Prince Edward Academy. Growing up, she was led to believe that the school was formed only after the public schools were closed, as an effort by white parents to salvage some kind of education for their children. In fact, the origins of the school go back to 1955, as part of a plan by the Defenders to reject the desegregation mandate. This second discovery offers further damning evidence of a premeditated effort by whites to use extreme measures to reject school integration, no matter the harm inflicted on the community at large.
