"The Issue Is the Control of Public Schools": The Politics of Desegregation in Prince Edward County, Virginia: An article from Southern Cultures 18:3, Fall 2012: The Politics Issue

By Dwana Waugh

Warren Brown recounts his hurried educational career. Unable to attend school until he was ten years old, Brown completed twelve grades in just seven years."

This article appears in the Fall 2012 issue of Southern Cultures. The full issue is also available as an ebook.

Southern Cultures is published quarterly (spring, summer, fall, winter) by the University of North Carolina Press. The journal is sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for the Study of the American South.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Center for the Study of the American South
• Release date: Sep 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469607375

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ESSAY

The Issue Is the Control of Public Schools

The Politics of Desegregation in Prince Edward County, Virginia

by Dwana Waugh

The issue is not the people versus the public schools . . . The issue is the control of public schools. The question is: Will public education be controlled by the people who pay for it, or by the federal courts, which under pressure of organized minorities threaten to dominate it?

—J. Barrye Wall, The True Story of Prince Edward County¹

After the Supreme Court declared segregated education unconstitutional in 1954, Prince Edward County’s white community and political leaders stopped funding the public schools and sustained a massively resistant approach for five years—the only community in the nation to do so. R. R. Moton High School, courtesy of VCU Libraries, James Branch Cabell Library, Special Collections and Archives.

Before a packed crowd of over 700 parents, teachers, and students, R. R. Moton High School alumnus Willie Shepperson revealed the high stakes involved with public school desegregation. At the April 28, 1969, Prince Edward County school board meeting, he outlined the county’s troubling educational and racial history and assured school officials that blacks, like whites, did not want interracial marriage. Instead, he argued, the issue is equalization. Shepperson’s pronouncement was a step forward from the earlier NAACP equalization suits of the 1930s and 1940s, in which lawyers pushed the federal courts to uphold the equal aspect of separate but equal by equalizing material resources. Integration held more promise for African Americans’ full participation in educational decision-making by enabling them to operate outside of Jim Crow racial geographies and power structures. To Shepperson and other Prince Edward County parents, this articulation of equality signaled a shift from a focus on racial integration to something more desirable: the power to determine their children’s education. Warning school officials that blacks were being pushed to the limit, Shepperson implored the school board to act quickly to right the racial wrongs done so consistently in the county.²

The central issue, in what