The civil rights movement affected many aspects of American life in the twentieth century, but perhaps none more than education. In the late eighteen hundreds, Southern states had established segregated public facilities, including schools, a policy upheld by the Supreme Court in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson. As long as schools for black and white children were equal, they could be separate. Virginia enshrined segregation in its new state constitution in 1902, which mandated “White and colored children shall not be taught in the same school but in separate schools.” By every measure, however, Virginia’s separate public schools for blacks were not equal. By the 1910s, some counties were spending more than ten times as much per white student as per student of color. A census in 1920 found more than 22,000 white students in high school, compared to 297 black students.
The state’s black population did not passively accept separate but unequal schools. They filed lawsuits in the late 1930s challenging this injustice. World War II briefly interrupted their momentum. After the war, Virginia’s citizens of color became even more active in demanding the equalization of facilities, curricula, and every aspect of schooling. In 1951, students at Farmville’s Robert Russa Moton High School and their parents sued in federal court, alleging that the school was not equal to the white high school in Prince Edward County. Their case became one of the four cases known to us as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.
This exhibit examines how Virginia responded to the Supreme Court’s momentous 1954 decision overturning “separate but equal” schools. The first case looks at the Brown decision and the various programs the state’s leaders pursued in trying to resist integration. The second case explores the responses of Virginia’s people, both those who favored integration and those who adamantly opposed it.
Images of the exhibit are available from Special Collections on Flickr.
Curator: Beatriz Hardy, Director of Special Collections; Exhibit design and installation: Jennie Davy, Burger Archives Specialist, with installation assistance from Ben Bromley.