Both Victors and Victims: Prince Edward County, Virginia, the NAACP, and Brown

In 1951, the 450 students at the all-black R.R. Moton High School in Prince Edward County, Virginia, walked out of their school in protest against its unequal conditions, as compared with the all-white Farmville High School. The students became plaintiffs in one of the cases that came to comprise Brown v. Board of Education (Davis v. County School Board). County officials closed all the public schools for five years, from 1959 to 1964, to circumvent the desegregation ruling. This Essay explores the ways in which the quest for equal education by blacks in the county led them through a cycle of victimhood and victory.

Black on Brown

The most important and illuminating early writing on Brown v. Board of Education is a nine-page essay by Charles Black. Black memorably shows that segregation was a crucial part of a racial caste system. At the same time, he cuts through legal abstractions that made it difficult to answer the question whether the Court’s decision was sufficiently “neutral.” At the same time, Black’s argument suffers from two serious problems: formalism and institution-blindness. Black writes as if his interpretation of the equal protection clause can be simply read off the clause, and he does not engage the complex institutional problems that were raised by the Court’s decision. Nonetheless, the legal culture needs more voices like Black’s.

Brown, School Choice, and the Suburban Veto

Many who are familiar with Brown v. Board of Education and the Southern response to the decision are at least vaguely aware that Southern states and school districts relied on school choice as one tool in their strategy of massive resistance. This Essay argues that Brown’s relationship to school choice, however, is more complicated, more long-lasting, and more important than this limited and familiar connection. It describes that relationship in more detail and explains why it is not only of historic interest, but of contemporary concern as well.

Brown, ironically and unintentionally, helped make the use of vouchers at religious schools constitutional. That is, Brown helped create the political and social conditions that made possible the Supreme Court’s 2002 decision in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, upholding the use of vouchers at religious schools. The Court’s approval of vouchers, in turn, is helping to fuel a broader school-choice movement. While once a threat to the realization of Brown’s promise, school choice may now be one of the only ways to achieve integration. Whether school choice will successfully promote integration, however, depends to a large degree on whether the political legacy of Milliken v. Bradley—what this Essay calls “the suburban veto”—can be overcome.