Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County

This chapter puts the school fight in Prince Edward County in the context of the larger civil rights movement nationwide. First, Green explains what happened throughout the South in the wake of the 1954 Brown decision. On President Eisenhower’s instructions, the nation’s capital began integrating schools almost immediately. Clinton High School in Tennessee was the first Southern high school to integrate—under a court order in 1956—but the move was accompanied by violence. That same year, New Orleans began integrating its schools, and first-grader Ruby Bridges became an iconic symbol of integration when she was painted by Norman Rockwell walking to school flanked by federal marshals. Desegregation happened very slowly in the South; as Green writes, by early 1961 “only 6 percent of black children across the country were attending integrated schools” (165).

Meanwhile, the larger civil rights movement was beginning to flower. The Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama, sparked by Rosa Parks in 1955, integrated that city’s bus system. A few years later, sit-ins became a favored tactic to desegregate restaurants and lunch counters. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed in 1960, after a visit by Martin Luther King Jr. to Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina.