Prince Edward schools have come a long way

By Del Stover

05/04/04 -- Walk the hallways of a Prince Edward County, Va., school, and you'll find good facilities, caring teachers, and black and white students learning together in an environment that mirrors the ideals we have for America's public schools.

But a far different -- and less savory -- environment existed in the county schools half a century ago.

Older black residents recalled that unfortunate time when they gathered two weeks ago at the old black high school -- now a museum -- to commemorate the fight for school desegregation.

In the early 1950s, Jim Crow was still the law of the land in Virginia. And conditions at Robert R. Moton High School, what was then the county's black-only secondary school, were difficult, recalls the Rev. J. Samuel Williams, president of the class of 1952.

White students attended a nice, modern schoolhouse, but blacks had to make do with an overcrowded main building and tar-paper shacks built to handle the overflow, he says.

Desks and blackboards were in short supply, remember other former students, and many textbooks were hand-me-downs considered too worn for white children.

But the county's worst days came in 1959, when rather than accept the inevitability of desegregation, the white power structure in Prince Edward County shut down the public schools for five long years. Nearly 1,700 students -- almost all black -- were simply denied an education.

It was a hateful act that shocked the local black community and earned the county national notoriety. To this day, the human cost of this outrageous betrayal of the public trust reverberates throughout the county.

"When parents or grandparents come into the school and are asked to sign their names, they look at you and say, 'Can you help me? I didn't get much of an education,' " says Rita Moseley, a secretary at Prince Edward County High School. "My heart just hurts. I know it's a result of the closing of the schools."

But if past wrongs still haunt older members of the community, the passing of decades -- along with hard work, sound educational decisions, and a determination by community members to right the wrongs of the past -- have led to a successful rebirth of the county schools.

Today's schools boast a high-quality academic program for all children and, unlike many school systems across the nation, Prince Edward County is truly desegregated. Indeed, its success is a shining example of the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education.

"It's a remarkable story," says George F. Bagby, a local university professor of English who volunteers with the Moton Museum. "It took a horrendous amount of work. But we can be proud of the schools now."

Remembering the past

During this year's celebration of the county's 250th anniversary, county leaders took note of the various historical figures -- from George Washington to Robert E. Lee -- who are known to have traveled the county's byways.

But, for many, the most important figure in the county's history was a quiet, intelligent high school student named Barbara Rose Johns. In 1951, she organized a walkout to protest conditions at Moton High School -- and inadvertently launched a chain of events that ultimately would help change public education across the nation.

Students had cause to complain. More than 450 students attended Moton, which was built to serve 180. But county officials were unwilling to invest money in the black schools and had responded to the overcrowding by building three tar-paper shacks on campus. The buildings leaked, recall former students, one of whom remembers using an umbrella to protect the papers on her desk.

In an account of events written after the walkout, Johns expressed the frustration and outrage that prompted her to organize the walkout. But her remarks also suggest a youthful innocence about the world.

"Her words show a mix of courage and remarkable naivete," Bagby says. "She really thought that once whites saw the conditions at the school, they'd fix it."

That didn't prove to be the case. But her actions in leading the walkout have since entered the province of local lore. A student lured the principal, M. Boyd Jones, away from the school with a telephone call complaining some students were causing trouble at the downtown bus station.

After he left to investigate, student organizers handpicked by Johns called students to the auditorium, where Johns made an impassioned speech for students to strike for better schools. For the next two weeks, students staged a walkout and tried unsuccessfully to make their case with school officials.

In the white community, reaction to the student walkout was mild at first. But white segregationists soon responded more forcefully. Parents of some striking students lost their jobs with the county, and Boyd was fired for failing to keep his students in line. A cross was burned on the school grounds.

But, the student walkout had emboldened the black community, already frustrated with the repeated failure of school officials to respond to their complaints about school conditions.

Within weeks, the NACCP filed a petition in federal court for desegregation, and Davis v. Prince Edward County would later be one of five court cases consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education.

Schools are closed

It was another three years before the U.S. Supreme Court made its landmark ruling in Brown. But the practical impact on the county schools would not be felt until 1959 -- when county officials betrayed the public trust.

It's hard today to understand the attitudes and emotions that swept through Virginia in the years following Brown. A way of life was nearing its end, and white segregationists were increasingly reacting with almost mindless belligerence.

"White and Negro children in the same schools will lead to miscegenation," proclaimed one newspaper article of the era. "Miscegenation leads to mixed marriages, and mixed marriages leads to the mongrelization of the human race."

The county board of supervisors, which was inspired by segregationists' call for "massive resistance" to desegregation and unwilling to accept the idea of black and white students sitting side-by-side in the classroom, refused to fund the public school budget.

A handful of school systems in the state also closed their schools for a time. But they eventually bowed to the inevitable once the courts ruled against the practice.

The schools in Prince Edward County remained closed for five years, until civil rights demonstrations across the South in the summer of 1963 put immense political pressure on state officials to take action.

By then, of course, much of the damage could not be undone. Although most white students continued their education at a hurriedly established private academy, nearly 1,700 black students had their education interrupted.

Some of these children never returned to school. Others were luckier. One family rented a shack in a nearby county so their children could attend county schools there. Moseley recalls that, after two years without a formal education, she was sent to live with two educators in another county -- complete strangers who agreed to teach her.

The human cost is incalculable. And local historians still debate the economic cost to the community. Some believe the notoriety that surrounded the county's actions discouraged a number of small industries from locating in the county.

And the decision still stings -- more than four decades later. "It was an awful thing to do," says Thomas Mayfield, a retired teacher and school administrator. "Here is a country that says all people are created equal, and here we were closing down the public schools to keep whites and blacks from going to school together. "

State officials finally forced the reopening of the schools, but while that was a step forward, it was not a particularly auspicious one. Funding was minimal, the academic program was inadequate, and most whites had long since fled to the county's segregationist private academy.

Saving the schools

That the school system recovered from these troubled times has been attributed to a variety of factors. But most county leaders agree that the schools' fortune began to change in 1972, when the school board hired John Anderson as superintendent.

It was an eye-opening experience, Anderson recalls of his first days on the job. "It was pretty well known that the schools had absolutely no backing from the white citizenry," he says. "When the Richmond newspapers interviewed me, they asked me how it felt to be superintendent of the worst school division in the state."

He accepted the position partly because he was intrigued by the challenges confronting the school system. But he was also outraged. There were no textbooks in the primary grades, for example, and test scores were the lowest in the state. Many teachers commuted from outside the county and showed little interest in the students' welfare.

In his first years, Anderson says change sometimes came slowly, and he bided his time as the county's more progressive-minded political and business leaders worked to ease out segregationist-minded board members and replace them with citizens committed to improving the schools.

It took almost seven years to wean out these obstructionists, he says. But, in the meantime, unanticipated help arrived. A damaging flood in the county and the subsequent clean-up effort distracted community leaders when he was making crucial -- and potentially controversial -- changes.

And the state passed a law that mandated a minimum level of local funding for public schools. "Local funds had to increase 48 percent to meet the state threshold, which shows what the funding was like before," he says.

Over his 25-year tenure, Anderson pushed through a variety of initiatives designed to improve the schools. He consolidated all schools onto one campus to allow for newer facilities and expanded course offerings. Academic benchmarks were set for each grade, and new academic, athletic, and extracurricular programs were created. Course offerings included Latin, world literature, journalism, and forensics.

Some of Anderson's initiatives were criticized as attempts to pander to white parents and lure their children back into the public schools. The wily school administrator is unrepentant. He says he simply was building the best educational program he could.

But there is little doubt that his efforts did make the public schools more attractive to whites. If the local private school offered one language, the public schools offered four. Soccer, tennis, and golf were added to the athletic program. High school students were given the opportunity to enroll in local university courses.

Success story

Whatever his intentions, Anderson's efforts were wildly successful. White parents began sending their children to the public schools, and community pride in the schools blossomed. By the time Anderson retired in 1997, white enrollment had climbed from 6 percent to 40 percent.

To reverse white flight to such a degree is unprecedented in recent education history -- and it is all the more astounding given the county's earlier hard-nosed resistance to desegregation.

Today, Anderson's successor, Margaret Blackmon, says the school system continues to provide a top-quality educational experience for its students. Excellence is still the byword for local educators, and, by way of example, she notes the elementary school recently revised its reading program after teachers studied strategies to bolster third and fourth-grade reading achievement.

Challenges remain, of course. Nearly 64 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, and more needs to be done to ensure disadvantaged students succeed academically.

But, even its critics acknowledge the school system has finally broken the shackles of its past. Today, community support for the schools is strong -- and school officials are acknowledging the past by offering honorary degrees to those now-aging former students who were denied an education in the 1960s.

Race will always an issue in a small Southern town, but school board Chair Sherry Honeycutt insists the issue is left outside the school doors -- at least as far as teachers and administrators are concerned.

And she sees that attitude increasingly prevalent in the community, as well. Working in real estate, she says, she meets many parents moving into the community who ask about the schools. "Rarely do I have people asking how many black children are there or how many white children are there. They don't care about that. What they care about are test scores."

That assessment is a tad rosy -- and one disputed by some members of the black community. For them, past wrongs still haunt the schools, and they see slights and the needs of black students going unaddressed.

Perhaps the best judge of the school system is the generation of students who now walk the school hallways. Drew Newton, a 17-year-old senior and student body president, acknowledges that young blacks and whites tend to naturally segregate on a social level.

But that's a far cry from the experiences of his parents and grandparents, he says. The issue of race is not nearly as big a deal.