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Combining hard-hitting investigative journalism and a sweeping family narrative, this provocative true story reveals a little-known chapter of American history: the period after the Brown v. Board of Education decision when one Virginia school system refused to integrate. In the wake of the Supreme Court's unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision, Virginia's Prince Edward County refused to obey the law. Rather than desegregate, the county closed its public schools, locking and chaining the doors. The community's white leaders quickly established a private academy, commandeering supplies from the shuttered public schools to use in their all-white classrooms. Meanwhile, black parents had few options: keep their kids at home, move across county lines, or send them to live with relatives in other states. For five years, the schools remained closed. Kristen Green, a longtime newspaper reporter, grew up in Farmville and attended Prince Edward Academy, which did not admit black students until 1986. In her journey to uncover what happened in her hometown before she was born, Green tells the stories of families divided by the school closures and of 1,700 black children denied an education. As she peels back the layers of this haunting period in our nation's past, her own family's role-no less complex and painful-comes to light. At once gripping, enlightening, and deeply moving, Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County is a dramatic chronicle that explores our troubled racial past and its reverberations today, and a timeless story about compassion, forgiveness, and the meaning of home.

AbstractFrom 1959 to 1964, Prince Edward County, Virginia, dodged a court desegregation order by refusing to operate public schools. Though the county played an integral role in the national battle over civil rights, scholars and journalists have largely neglected Prince Edward's role in the national drama of race. In 1951, Black high school students went on strike to protest unequal school facilities. This strike led to an NAACP lawsuit that became one of five decided inBrown v. Board of Education. When faced with a final desegregation deadline in 1959, the county put itself in a unique position by becoming the only school district in the U.S. to close its public schools for an extended period of time rather than accept any desegregation. Most White students attended a private, segregated academy; over three-quarters of Black Prince Edward students lost some or all of those years of education. White county leaders believed they were creating a blueprint for defying desegregation in the rural South and perhaps, they hoped, throughout much of the United States. Using archival materials, interviews and secondary accounts, I explain how White county leaders made a public case for the school closings. These leaders' rhetorical strategy was a crucial early draft in the depiction of segregation as a natural state free of racial rancor. The segregationist rhetoric emanating from Prince Edward County was grounded primarily in arguments for privatization, local self-determination, and taxpayers' rights. Such arguments would come to dominate conservative rhetoric nationwide.

"When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Prince Edward County, Virginia, home to one of the five cases combined by the Court under Brown, abolished its public school system rather than integrate. Jill Titus situates the crisis in Prince Edward County within the seismic changes brought by Brown and Virginia's decision to resist desegregation. While school districts across the South temporarily closed a building here or there to block a specific desegregation order, only in Prince Edward did local authorities abandon public education entirely--and with every intention of permanence. When the public schools finally reopened after five years of struggle--under direct order of the Supreme Court--county authorities employed every weapon in their arsenal to ensure that the newly reopened system remained segregated, impoverished, and academically substandard. Intertwining educational and children's history with the history of the black freedom struggle, Titus draws on little-known archival sources and new interviews to reveal the ways that ordinary people, black and white, battled, and continue to battle, over the role of public education in the United States"--

In December 1883, Peter Lazier was shot in the heart during a bungled robbery at a Prince Edward County farmhouse. Three local men, pleading innocence from start to finish, were arrested and charged with his murder. Two of them - Joseph Thomset and David Lowder - were sentenced to death by a jury of local citizens the following May. Nevertheless, appalled community members believed at least one of them to be innocent - even pleading with prime minister John A. Macdonald to spare them from the gallows.The Lazier Murder explores a community's response to a crime, as well as the realization that it may have contributed to a miscarriage of justice. Robert J. Sharpe reconstructs and contextualizes the case using archival and contemporary newspaper accounts. The Lazier Murder provides an insightful look at the changing pattern of criminal justice in nineteenth-century Canada, and the enduring problem of wrongful convictions

This paper examines the closure of public schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia from 1959-1964 in an effort to avoid desegregation. Specifically, the paper traces the roots of the political actions which led to the closure and then-Governor Harry Byrd's role in Virginia's political machine at the time. The paper argues that it was Byrd's influence which led to the conditions that not only made the closure possible in Virginia, but encouraged the white citizens of Prince Edward County to make their stand.

"Prepared by Mr. Edward Overman in candidacy for the degree of doctor of philosophy in political science at the University of Virginia [1940]" - Editorial foreword. ; "Printed and mimeographed." ; Bibliography: p. [157-163. ; Mode of access: Internet.