Success Bought at a High Cost

摘要

Of all the communites among the Brown cases, this rural, Black Belt county in Virginia may have suffered the deepest scars-but not from bombs, cross burnings or any of the other violence desegregation sparked in much of the rest of the South. While today educators call its schools a model of integration, in 1959, Prince Edward County locked its schoolhouses for five long years rather than comply with Brown. "It turned our lives completely around," says Rita Moseley, a slender, soft-spoken school secretary and grandmother who was 12 the year the schools closed. "I will always wonder what I would have done, who I would have been." Prince Edward is the only place where the students themselves launched the drive for integration. Before Brown, the county's black high school was so overcrowded, some pupils attended class in leaky, tar-papered shacks outside. Their outdated textbooks and buses were hand-me-downs from the white schools. One spring day in 1951, more than 450 students walked out to demand a new school. The student strikers wrote to N.A.A.C.P. lawyers in nearby Richmond, who took on their cause, and the case Davis v. County School Board was launched.