Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County

Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County is a 2015 nonfiction book by Kristen Green about the closing of public schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia from 1959 to 1964, following the 1954 United States Supreme Court ruling that school segregation is unconstitutional. During the five years the public schools were closed, black students in Prince Edward County largely went uneducated while a new private school for whites, Prince Edward Academy, opened. The book tells its story via two tracks: One describes the history and consequences of the school closings; the other recounts the author’s personal story as a county resident and alumna of Prince Edward Academy.

In 1951, a student named Barbara Johns led her classmates in a strike at the all-black Moton High School to protest the school’s poor conditions and overcrowding. All over the South at that time, schools were segregated by race, with black students attending different schools from white students. The protest turned into a lawsuit, which was combined with four others under the name Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in 1954 found that separate schools were “inherently unequal” and ordered that desegregation begin, without specifying a deadline or method. Schools in Virginia and elsewhere delayed implementing desegregation until a subsequent ruling ordered that the public schools of Prince Edward County integrate races beginning with the 1959 school year. Rather than comply, the county closed all public schools.

In response, white leaders and parents in Prince Edward County opened a private academy for white students only. Teachers initially held classes in various buildings throughout the community until a new school building was constructed. Black students, on the other hand, were left with no place to go for schooling in Prince Edward County. As a result, some black children moved away to attend schools in other counties or states—the down side of which was that they often had to leave without their families. However, most black students in Prince Edward County stayed home and lost four years of their education. In 1963, a temporary private school for both blacks and whites opened. And then, in 1964, the Supreme Court ordered the county to reopen all public schools.

The school closings had long-lasting effects on the community, including higher illiteracy rates, loss of income, and a legacy of distrust between blacks and whites. When the public schools reopened, the new student body was overwhelmingly black, as white parents still sent their children to Prince Edward Academy. The county has struggled to get its public student population to reflect that of the entire community. The former Moton High School for black students, now a museum, provides a platform for telling the story of the long road to school integration in the county. It also acts as a meeting place for residents to share experiences and begin to heal.

The author has two significant personal connections to this history. First, Green’s grandfather was part of a group of white citizens who opposed the Brown ruling’s desegregation mandate and was a school board member of the all-white Prince Edward Academy. Green attended the private school, as did her parents, and both her mother and younger brother worked there. Second, Green’s family employed a black housekeeper, Elsie Lancaster, who was directly affected by the school closings: She sent her daughter to attend school in Massachusetts and suffered great distress from the lasting damage this did to the mother-daughter relationship. Green, who, in the present-day narrative, has moved back to Virginia, weaves threads of these personal stories into the details of past events informed by her research. Green herself marries a multiracial man and they have two children, allowing her to see firsthand some of the issues nonwhite people in the community face even today.