Poison Pill

Long before they became a nation, Britain’s North American colonies recognized the core need for an educated populace and society’s obligation to provide that education. In 1635 Virginia opened the first free taxpayer-supported public school. During the 1640s, the governing body of the Massachusetts Bay Colony ordered every town in the colony’s jurisdiction of 50 or more residents to hire a schoolmaster to teach at least the basics of reading, writing, and mathematics. By the time the colonies declared independence, the idea that public education was a central responsibility of local governments was embedded in the American psyche. Literacy and numeracy were tools basic to the task of fulfilling the promise that all had a right to pursue happiness. Given the importance of public education in a democratic society, it was particularly startling in the late 1950s to see officials in a number of states advocating completely shutting down their public schools; even more startling, a handful of systems actually did so. To facilitate so drastic a step, state legislatures deliberately rescinded longstanding statutes requiring local governments to provide public schools. The powers that be in those states held that more important than educating the public was the need to prevent integration of White and Negro children—an integration that had been mandated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 in the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Most communities in the 11 Southern states spent years vigorously fighting that mandate, and when forced to integrate responded so grudgingly that a mix of racially divided housing patterns, legal and bureaucratic hurdles, violence, and intimidation either kept most Blacks out of supposedly integrated schools or sent Whites fleeing public schools for segregated private alternatives. As late as the 1968-69 school year, only 32 percent of African American public-school students in the Southern states were in schools with White classmates.

But at least those public schools were open. Nowhere was the extreme measure of combating integration by entirely shutting down public education as pervasive—and as persistent—as in Virginia. In that state’s Prince Edward County, schools closed for a full five years. White students received pared-down