On March 18, 1960, the Prince Edward County School Board in Farmville, Virginia, adopted its annual budget — a routine act of local governance that carried a devastating irony. Just months earlier, in the summer of 1959, the county had taken the almost unthinkable step of closing every public school within its borders. The reason: to avoid complying with the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling demanding the desegregation of public schools. Prince Edward County became the only county in American history to shut down its entire public school system rather than integrate. White families quickly pivoted — private segregation academies, funded partly by public vouchers, sprang up to serve white children. Black children in the county, roughly 1,700 of them, were left with nothing. No classrooms. No teachers. No future, at least in the eyes of those who ran the county. And yet, there was the school board on that March evening, carefully reviewing budget line items, increasing some, dropping others, and adopting the whole thing unanimously. Superintendent McIlwaine framed it clinically — the board needed to go through the proper ‘motions’ required by Virginia state law, submitting estimates to the Board of Supervisors before April. The law required a budget. So they made one. For a system they had gutted. The OCR fragment notes cryptically that ‘three factors account for’ the budget differences compared to prior years — a sentence that trails off, but whose implication is clear enough. A school system that isn’t educating children costs less to run. The Prince Edward school closures lasted until 1964, when the Supreme Court ruled in Griffin v. County School Board that the county could not constitutionally close its schools while funding private white academies. By then, an entire generation of Black children in Farmville had lost years of education — some permanently. The ‘Free Schools’ opened in 1963 under the Kennedy administration attempted to repair some of the damage, but no program could give back those years. Farmville’s story eventually found its way into civil rights histories, but this particular moment — a school board voting on a budget with bureaucratic calm in the middle of an act of mass educational disenfranchisement — captures something uniquely chilling about how institutional evil can dress itself in the ordinary.
Originally reported in Image 1 of The Farmville herald (Farmville, Va.), March 18, 1960. Source: Library of Congress — Chronicling America.
