Prince Edward by Dennis McFarland

Author:Dennis McFarland [McFarland, Dennis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-6508-4
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-12-18T15:26:00+00:00

7

THE FARMVILLE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH—where donations of books for the Prince Edward Academy were to be collected, and where Mother and I served as volunteers that first Monday morning of Library Week—had a particular history with regard to school closings. There had been another time, four years earlier, in 1955, when the county supervisors, threatened with the prospect of having to integrate schools, elected not to fund public education. The idea of closing schools this way—by declining to fund them—most likely originated in Virginia with the Defenders of Sovereign States and Individual Liberties, and the Defenders’ first president, Robert Crawford, was a prominent member of the Farmville Presbyterian Church.

After the U.S. Supreme Court had decided Brown v. Board of Education in May of 1954, it took another whole year to hand down its implementation decree, charging local governments to desegregate public schools “with all deliberate speed.” Ordinary people like my mother—only modestly informed of current events and too busy answering the demands of domestic life to participate much in civic affairs—didn’t imagine, when they heard about Brown, that it would actually apply to Prince Edwardians. We had our own way of doing things in Southside, and for all appearances there wasn’t anything broken in our county that required a new law to fix it. There’d been that fuss some years ago at R. R. Moton, but in response we’d built an $800,000 Negro high school with all the modern amenities.

For another breed of person, however, Brown v. Board of Education sounded an alarm, a call to action. It wasn’t quite five months after Brown that a state charter was granted to the Defenders, which already boasted two thousand members. By the time the Supreme Court handed down its implementation decree in 1955, the Defenders were not only a going concern, they’d already drawn themselves a picture of what resistance to the court’s order should look like. With Mr. Wall’s Herald at their disposal, they didn’t have much trouble putting this same picture in the minds of most of Prince Edward’s white folks. The Defenders’ primary purpose was to maintain segregated schools—they published a report in ’55, claiming that integration would lead to the “death of our Anglo-Saxon civilization”—and with the help of their lawyers they quickly made the brilliant observation that the Supreme Court hadn’t said a word about a county’s right not to fund public education; it said only that where there were public schools, the schools had to be integrated. In April of ’55, a month before the court had even issued its implementation decree, a Defenders delegation approached the Board of Supervisors in Prince Edward and asked them to do that very thing—not to fund the schools. Since some of the supervisors were themselves Defenders, it didn’t prove a difficult argument to win. At its official meeting in May, the board voted not to appropriate the money necessary to run the public schools. (When, at Daddy Cary’s party, Lainie had said to Al that the whole thing had

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