Separate But Not Equal: Race, Education, and Prince Edward County, Virginia

Introduction

On April 23, 1951, the students of all-black Moton High School in Prince Edward County, Virginia decided that they had had enough of the poor conditions of their school and walked out. Organized and led by Barbara Rose Johns, the students' strike demands were simple: facilities equal to those provided to white high school students as required by law. Four years earlier the school had been ruled inadequate by the State Board of Education and, by 1951, the facility which had been built to accommodate 180 students was being used to serve 450. But coming four years before Rosa Parks would refuse to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus and nine years before sit-ins at Greensboro lunch counters, the students' simple demands set off a firestorm that changed the landscape of American education.

Attorneys Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill of the Richmond NAACP met with the students and agreed to represent them if, rather than seek equal facilities, they would instead challenge Virginia's law requiring segregated schools. Their case eventually became one of five included in the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas Supreme Court decision overturning the "Separate but Equal" precedent set in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Virginia Senator Harry Byrd subsequently led a policy of "Massive Resistance" to court-mandated integration in the state, which ended only under federal and state court pressures in 1959. But this defeat did not silence the segregationists of Prince Edward County, which chose to close its public schools from 1959 to 1964 rather than integrate them.

During that period, Prince Edward County would become the focus of many on both sides of the desegregation issue. Money poured in from segregationists all over the nation which helped the county to open an all-white private school and representatives from localities throughout the South flocked to Prince Edward County to take lessons in fighting desegregation. Likewise, pro-integration organizations such as the NAACP and the American Friends Service Committee arrived to investigate and report on the situation in Prince Edward County and offer educational alternatives for the locked-out African-American students.

At the time the Moton students walked out, Edward H. Peeples was a high school sophomore and basketball player in Richmond, Virginia. By the fall of 1953, he had entered Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University) with what he describes today as "all the traditional prejudices" of his southern, white experience. Richmond Professional Institute proved to be a stimulating place for him. The campus, classrooms and local restaurants functioned like salons, providing a place safe from the prejudices where new ideas could be discussed. By the mid-1950s, he was active in the Civil Rights movement and involved in activities seeking to reform Virginia's social policies. After graduating in 1957, a two year Navy stint, and working for two years a public assistance caseworker, he left for the University of Pennsylvania to seek his Master's in Human Relations. His concerns for the state of race relations in Virginia prompted him to return to continue to visit Prince Edward County to research his thesis, The Prince Edward County Virginia School Issue (1963).

During the course of his research, Peeples - now an Emeritus professor after serving VCU in the Department of Preventive Medicine and Community Health as well as other departments for over 30 years, photographed over 100 images of both black and white schools in Prince Edward County. Many of those images are presented here.

VCU Libraries is proud to house the papers of Dr. Edward H. Peeples, Jr. and to present this exhibit of images of his photographs and several of his written works on Prince Edward County. While individual photographs from his collection have occasionally appeared in books and articles about the Prince Edward County school closings, this is the first time that the images have been presented en masse to show the conditions that prompted a student strike and captured Dr. Peeples' interest and sympathies.  

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