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{ 95 } CHAPTER 5 DIGGING UP SOME LIBERALS As darkness fell on June 3, 1960, a group of white residents committed to the eventual reopening of the Prince Edward public schools emerged from a semisecret meeting at former school board chairman Maurice Large’s cabin. They found a “patrol force” of PESF board members waiting outside to identify them. A car parked on a nearby public road trained its headlights upon all the vehicles exiting from Large’s driveway, and attendee Lester Andrews spotted one of his friends writing down names. A story circulated that C. W. “Rat” Glenn, one of the most feared men in the county, had forced several drivers off the road in an effort to get their license plate numbers. Other attendees later claimed that PESF officials stopped and questioned them as they drove up to their homes.1 The “Bush Leaguers,”2 as PESF supporters derisively labeled them, woke up the following day to find that a mimeographed set of their meeting minutes , listing many attendees by name, was circulating around Farmville. In a lengthy passage of purple prose distributed with the minutes, a PESF member had branded all those connected with the Bush League as traitors. Pointing to the high percentage of businessmen in attendance, the writer accused them of being “willing to sell their honor and the moral upbringing of our white children for a few dollars which they alledgedly [sic] lost by a business slump blamed by them on our school situation.” Further, the attendees were charged with allying with “these socialist, intergrationalists [sic], do gooders’ and educationalists who would sacrifice your children.” Even those who did not see the document heard the stories, which grew in magnitude as they circulated. One attendee later noted that “the rumors about that meeting on the lake are something fierce. Now they have it that [NAACP counsel] Oliver Hill was there and that we all were going to integrate the schools right then.”3 The hostility toward the Bush Leaguers was ferocious. Two attendees had their jobs threatened, and one quit when his supervisor told him that no man could work for him and participate in such activities. Norfolk journalist Bob Smith observed friends passing each other on the street without speaking and irate whites refusing to patronize stores where they had shopped all their lives. 96 } Digging Up Some Liberals One attendee suffered so much over the allegations made against him that he visited a lawyer in Richmond to discuss the possibility of a slander suit.4 Many of the Bush Leaguers were Prince Edward natives. Traumatized by the hostility that greeted theirattempt at moderation, the majority retreated underground and the group folded, never to meet again.5 But the movement that produced the Bush League revealed evidence, for the first time, that the Prince Edward white community included people who, with support and encouragement , might stand against the county’s course of action and form the core of a pro-public schools coalition. Pursuing this possibility, AFSC staff members reoriented their work in the county to place the nurturing of an interracial moderates ’ coalition on an equal plane with providing much-needed services to the black community. The spirit that animated the Bush League first flickered in January, when PESF administrators approached the Prince Edward County School Board with the request that it surplus Farmville High. Virginia state law required referenda upon the sale of public school buildings, but it allowed school boards the authority to declare buildings surplus and dispose of them upon their own terms. The board refused the request, declaring that any disposal of public school property would require a referendum. As pressure to accept the offer continued to build, board members, particularly Chairman Lester Andrews, found themselves subject to much hostile scrutiny. Some friends questioned their commitment to white education; others avoided them entirely. Manipulation and avoidance even trickled down to the teenage population; in the midst of the standoff, one of Andrews’s children came to him with the plea, “Daddy, if you’ll sell the schools I can go to a party.”6 When the PESF made a second request to purchase the school buildings, Andrews staged a tactical walkout. Perhaps somewhat to his own surprise, four of the five other board members—George Shorter, Charles Baird, Calvin Bass, and T. Cooke Hix—followed him. This mass resignation of five-sixths of the school board threatened to crack the façade of complete white unity. None of the...

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