How Delayed Desegregation Deprived Black Children of Their Right to Education

Carlton Terry was twelve the year Prince Edward County schools closed to Black children. Thinking back on that first year, he said, “All I knew was that I wasn’t in school, and I knew the reason why. I realized that the legal system was not working, at least not working for me. I remember sitting at home, watching Amos ’n’ Andy on TV, shell-shocked. I read the newspaper every day to see what would happen.” After a year sitting at home, his family, as was true for most Black families, came to understand there was no real end in sight. They decided to take the Quakers up on their offer to send him to school in Massachusetts. In reflecting on the period, he says, “I only lost one year, and I feel like I was hurt. But imagine what it must be like for those who lost four or five years, or never went back.”

By the spring of 1960, a federal judge again ruled that Virginia had to stop using taxpayer money to fund a school system only for white children. No matter—at least initially, district officials ignored that court ruling. In addition, white officials helped themselves to public school resources, simply taking what they wanted from locked public schools. They took books, desks, and even goalposts for a new football field at the private, white-only school. A local businessman, Robert Taylor, recalled that white officials took “everything but the clocks.” Carlton Terry, the young man who had to relocate to Massachusetts to receive an education, told the Washington Post reporter that he “eventually got to the point where I hated whites.”

For the first few years, the federal government ignored the continued Massive Resistance taking place in plain view. President Dwight Eisenhower, who was in office from 1953 to 1961, was no fan of Brown, once noting that it was unlikely white people would comply with the ruling. “I do not believe that prejudices,” he said, “will succumb to compulsion,” adding that he believed imposing federal law on the states “would set back the cause of race relations a long, long time.” Initially, pleas to Eisenhower about this slow murder of children’s educational futures did not garner much response at all.

It took until Christmas of 1962, three years into the standoff, for the Justice Department to join the NAACP as a friend of the court in its appeal of the Prince Edward case. By then, the nation had a new presidential administration and a new attorney general named Robert F. Kennedy. He joined the fray, filing a legal brief arguing that states’ rights aside, federal courts retained the power to require the Virginia county to levy taxes that would be used to operate desegregated public schools.

Then, in a special message to Congress on civil rights in February 1963, the attorney general’s brother, President John Kennedy, urged the parties to reach a speedy resolution of the legal issues and promised aid for the remedial education of Black children when the schools reopened. He pledged to “fulfill the constitutional objective of an equal, non-segregated educational opportunity for all children.” Speaking on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, Robert Kennedy noted “with as much sadness as irony that outside of Africa south of the Sahara, the only places on earth known not to provide free public education are Communist China, North Vietnam, Sarawak [Borneo], British Honduras—and Prince Edward County.”

The brothers continued to apply pressure. More than just offering talk, Kennedy’s administration joined state and private organizers in creating a new entity called the Prince Edward County Free School Association and rented three of the closed public schools for Black students to attend during the 1963–64 school year. School and other elected officials were still unwilling to desegregate, fund, and reopen all public schools, so foundations, businesses, and individuals from around the country took up the mantle, contributing a total of $1 million to help provide accredited, robust educational offerings to Black students in this unorthodox fashion.

Neil Sullivan, a principal in a Long Island school district, took leave from his job to run one of the schools, called the Prince Edward County Free School. Sullivan sought out and hired a multiracial faculty from around the country to teach at the school. In the spring of 1964, Robert Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, visited Farmville to assess these privately funded experimental Free (as opposed to public) Schools that had come into being under his leadership. Two weeks after their visit, and ten years after the Brown decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Prince Edward County to reopen and desegregate its schools, and the district finally felt forced to comply.

By then, Prince Edward Academy was the only segregation academy that remained open in the state, and its operators rushed to plunder more educational dollars from the taxpayer coffers before the deadline. The summer before the public schools were set to open, white administrators set aside $180,000 meant to go toward the schools that the county’s 1,700 Black children would finally be allowed to attend. But at the same time, on that same day in July, they approved a law to allocate that exact amount of money in grants to white parents who wanted to continue to send their children to the white-only private school.

Anticipating that a federal judge would issue an injunction to block the illegal plan, the town officials instructed the seven hundred white parents of academy students to gather at the school board at two a.m. if they wanted to receive one last tuition grant. There, the board gave the waiting parents $250 grants on a first-come, first-served basis, until the grant funds were exhausted, for a total of $180,000. With checks in hand, the lucky academy parents rushed to one of the town’s three banks, which had opened early so the recipients could deposit their checks before a new court order could stop them. The bit of justice found in this story is that two years later, a federal appeals court ruled that the six county officials on the Board of Supervisors who had approved both the scheme and its unorthodox timing were personally responsible for repaying the funds to the county.

On September 16, 1963, a full four years after the public schools had been padlocked, Shirley Davidson finally got to ride a school bus. She was among 1,520 students, all but four of whom were Black, who enrolled in the Free School system the Kennedy administration had helped open. Black children had schools, but after all that time, money, heartbreak, separation, and tragedy, it was still segregated and, because of the white officials’ scheme, still did not have access to taxpayer funds.

During the years she had been out of school, Hazel had tutored her daughter Shirley in reading and math, so when schools opened, Shirley was well prepared academically. The same was far from true for the majority. Neil Sullivan confidently announced in the press that “our first task will be a mass attack on reading skills,” but he confided to an interviewer that “four years’ loss will never be made up entirely.” A student named Sylvia Eanes was in the third grade when the schools were closed. She said she was placed in the eighth grade when they reopened, as though she had been in school all along. She recalled, “The teachers just pushed us through, wanted us out.”

After graduation, Sylvia didn’t think she could spell well enough to pass the test to fulfill her dream of one day becoming a licensed practical nurse. She settled for a job in a local food-processing factory. Her older brother, McCarthy, drove a school bus for white children during the closings. He was twenty-one when he returned to school and twenty-two when he graduated, was drafted, and sent to Vietnam. When asked to reflect on the time, he told the reporter for the Washington Post, “My country called me to fight in Vietnam, but wouldn’t let me go to school.” It was not until 1978 that the last school district to have used public money to support private white schools ceased to do so.

In the 1940s and 1950s, we in the United States were told by psychologists, lawyers, and civil rights leaders that integration was the cure for the chronic underemployment, low college completion rates, and economic disparities faced by Black and other economically and politically vulnerable people. No one warned about how the cost, extreme white backlash, could further harm Black children who just wanted to learn. The problems were not confined to the South.

In the decade or so after Brown, Black people in the United States had reason to believe that at last the equal citizenship they had long fought for might be coming into view. Several events, aside from the Supreme Court deeming them worthy of equality in classrooms, promised a new phase in the Black freedom struggle: starting in December 1955, the yearlong Montgomery Bus Boycott, which saw tens of thousands of Black people in Montgomery, Alabama, refusing to ride the city’s buses to protest segregation and maltreatment, had brought a twenty-seven-year-old preacher named Martin Luther King and a longtime activist named Rosa Parks onto the world stage. The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, striking down Jim Crow laws and prohibiting discrimination based on race.

But by 1968, government reports told a story of urban cities with education systems so bad that young Black people were inspired to rage in rebellion. Once-strong school systems in cities like Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, Newark, and elsewhere wobbled as white families fled to the suburbs, leaving behind poorly staffed and funded institutions that, because the troubles were blamed on poor or nonexistent Black family structures, damaged and overpoliced the Black children left behind in them.

Because racial segregation was not written into law in the North, most of its school districts, courts, and politicians claimed that the Brown decision did not apply to them. Whatever segregation did exist, lawyers and politicians argued, was a natural byproduct of racist discrimination in housing rather than an issue within schools themselves. This de facto segregation, though damaging to the prospects of societal advancement for American citizens who were poor and of color, was legal, they said.

Of course, the NAACP argued that the Brown decision should apply to de facto segregation as well, and civil rights groups sued school boards in cities such as Cincinnati, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Richmond, California; and Boston, Massachusetts, among others, urging school districts to integrate. But in the 1960s North, rising levels of anti-integration activism, not courtroom battles, most forcefully brought the issues of race, segregation, and education to a head. Though the South receives the lion’s share of focus regarding the pushback against integration, white rejection of Black children in white schools above the Mason-Dixon Line was no less ugly.

New York City is but one city where there was concern among citizens and elected officials alike about the Brown decision. While there were certainly some who wanted New York to get a jump on desegregating schools, others had already actively started plotting for the opposite. In 1964, the New York City Board of Education proposed a plan that would have seen a modest forty thousand of the one million students enrolled in the district transferred to different schools through a combination of school rezoning and busing.

White people who opposed mandatory integration decrees protested against sending their children to schools outside their neighborhoods, but their true concerns were revealed in their rejection of a plan that would do the opposite: bus Black and Latino students between Harlem and predominantly white Staten Island. The protesters were so vocal and vigorous in their resistance to the city’s desegregation plans that school officials soon completely abandoned any efforts to either integrate or desegregate schools in the city. Today, New York City schools are the most segregated in the nation.

According to research by the historian Matt Delmont, Black parents and civil rights advocates, like seasoned activist Ella Baker and sociologist Kenneth Clark—whose research with his wife, Mamie, was central to the Brown decision—urged city officials to institute desegregation plans. In 1964, in one of the largest civil rights protests to have taken place in the United States, Reverend Milton Galamison organized a citywide boycott of New York City schools through an organization called the Citywide Committee for Integrated Schools. The boycott was also supported by the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality, the National Urban League, the Harlem Parents’ Committee, and the Parents’ Workshop for Equality.

On the day, 460,000 students and teachers stayed out of school to protest the lack of a comprehensive plan for desegregation, marching through the city to bring attention to the fact that racial segregation was not confined to the South. In the decade between the Brown decision and the boycott, march leaders pointed out, segregation in New York City schools had become more entrenched rather than dissipating. Pleased with the initial turnout, organizers planned a second boycott for the following month. But before the second march could take place, thousands of white parents—mostly white mothers—marched in slush and snow across the Brooklyn Bridge in counterprotest. As they walked, they came up with little songs and chants that all had one thing in common: they were against any integration plans that involved busing their children into schools in the city’s “slums.” Their objections made clear that the fight for integration was held back by the view that majority-Black schools were inherently flawed and degraded by having Black children in classrooms with other Black children.

In 1963, according to a New York Times article, the state’s education commissioner, Dr. James E. Allen Jr., warned that “any school that exceeds a non-white enrollment of 50 per cent is ‘in danger’ of becoming racially imbalanced—with the implication that such imbalance is equivalent with inferior education.” In school districts outside the South, the desire to implement desegregation kept coming up against white people’s unwillingness to accept any changes. This would become an enduring theme with significant national consequences.

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Excerpted from Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children by Noliwe Rooks. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Noliwe Rooks.