The County That Closed Its Public Schools Rather Than Desegregate After Brown v. Board of Education

by Arica L. Coleman

Arica L. Coleman is a scholar of U.S. history and the author of That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia and a former chair of the Committee on the Status of African American, Latino/a, Asian American, and Native American (ALANA) Historians and ALANA Histories at the Organization of American Historians.

When judicial nominee Wendi Vitter made headlines last month for evading a question at her confirmation hearing about whether or not she agreed with the 1954 landmark civil rights decision in Brown v. Board of Education, some punditsdismissed the idea that the question ought to be taken seriously. This line of questioning only served as a “gotcha” moment, the argument went, and Vitter’s remark that she preferred not to comment didn’t mean she wanted to see the case overturned. That may be true, but the idea that Brown could be challenged is not a ridiculous one. This landmark decision has been under attack since the day it became law.

In fact, the first wave of resistance lasted an entire decade, during which time Prince Edward County, Va., school officials closed public schools for five whole years rather than comply with the Supreme Court order to desegregate.

Brown v. Board of Education began with a class action suit filed in 1951 on behalf of Oliver Brown, a black Methodist minister whose daughter was refused enrollment at the “whites only” elementary school near her home in Topeka, Kans. The case soon gained national attention and many rightly predicted that it was the test case that—rolled together with four additional cases—would overturn the doctrine of “separate but equal” that had been established in Plessy v. Fergusonin 1896.

While the specifics of the cases under the Brown umbrella varied, the court ruled on the single fundamental question that underscored them all: “Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race . . . deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does,” Chief Justice Earl Warren stated in the unanimous decision handed down on May 17, 1954.

As TIME reported at the time, the decision stunned the nation. While officials from Oklahoma and Kansas vowed that the order would be carried out “with little trouble” and Texas stated that it would “comply,” Georgia—which like South Carolina had passed laws to abolish public education in anticipation of the decision—was the court’s loudest and harshest southern critic. Sen. Richard Russell did not mince words, calling the decision, “A flagrant abuse of judicial power,” and vowing that state officials, “will map a program to insure continued and permanent segregation of the races.” ...

Read entire article at Time Magazine