0062268678 _N_ by Kristen Green Page B

the governor to reopen the schools. At the start of the New Year, 1,800 blacks gathered in Richmond to protest the school closings in an eighteen-block march.
    Two court decisions on January 19—one from a federal court, the other from the state supreme court—found the massive resistance laws to be unconstitutional and demanded that the schools be reopened. Almond reacted angrily in a radio address on January 20, declaring, “We have just begun to fight.” He said new tools would be sought in legislative session to replace the massive resistance laws that had been struck down.
    Addressing “those whose purpose and design is to blend and amalgamate the white and Negro race and destroy the integrity of both races,” “those who don’t care what happens to the children of Virginia,” and “those who defend or close their eyes to the livid stench of sadism, sex, immorality, and juvenile pregnancy infesting the mixed schools of the District of Columbia and elsewhere,” he said, “I will not yield to that which I know to be wrong and will destroy every semblance of education for thousands of the children of Virginia.”
    Almond, who once vowed to “cut off my right arm” before allowing a black child to enroll in a white school, later regretted the harsh rhetoric he had directed at blacks. His options had run out, and some saw the speech as his last stand. He quickly realized the futility of his stance and asked the general assembly to repeal the massive resistance legislation, to the bitter disappointment of Byrd and others who did not accept the decision. In February, black students enrolled in white schools in Norfolk and Arlington, just miles from the nation’s capital, without drama or disturbances. This ugly chapter of Virginia’s history seemed to be coming to a close.
    Still, Prince Edward remained resolute. The Defenders’ Robert Crawford proclaimed that the whites of the county “are standing just where they were five years ago,” adding “they’re just as firm in their opposition to integration.” As other communities chose to integrate their schools—or at least desegregate classrooms in some schools—rather than sacrifice public education, Prince Edward’s leaders were determined not to give in to the federal government.
    After years of avoiding desegregation, Prince Edward’s day of reckoning finally came in May 1959. “The U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals dropped a bombshell on Prince Edward County,” the Farmville Herald proclaimed in a front-page headline. An appellate court reversed a lower court’s decision that the district had until 1965 to desegregate and ordered the schools to take immediate steps to admit qualified black students, noting that the county had not taken a single step toward desegregation. The court set the deadline for September 1959.
    What happened next had been foreshadowed years earlier. The county’s white leaders responded exactly as they had warned. Defying the new court order, the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors announced it would eliminate the county’s entire education budget, thereby closing all twenty-one white and black public schools. The operating principle of ethical governments—“do no harm”—was roundly ignored. It was better to abandon schools, county leaders decided, than for white children to sit in a classroom next to black classmates.
    “It is with the most profound regret that we have been compelled to take this action,” the board said in a statement. The board suggested that it “should not bring about conditions which would most certainly result in further racial tension and which might result in violence.” The board added that the schools had been closed “in accord with the will of the people of the county.”
    Gordon Moss, an associate dean at Longwood, denounced the decision as “unchristian” and an act of “unintentional evil.” The Ministerial Alliance of Farmville and Vicinity urged the supervisors to rescind it, saying it was “contrary to the