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{ 38 } CHAPTER 2 WE SUFFERED OUR CHILDREN TO BE DESTROYED While the white community expressed its solidarity through building the Foundation schools, Prince Edward blacks threw themselves into organizing the Prince Edward County Christian Association (PECCA), fighting the closings through legal channels and setting up programs to minimize the damage done to the children. Observers and residents alike agreed that PECCA enjoyed strong mass support and that the majorityof local blacks supported the NAACP campaign. Charles Herndon, who was four years old when the schools closed, later concluded that roughly 75 percent of the black community desired integration , an attitude he ascribed primarily to the widespread influence of Martin Luther King Jr.’s idea of brotherhood.1 Vonita White Foster was in fourth grade when the schools closed. She also remembered the fervency of community belief that integration would cure the ills and inequalities of the county school system. Unlike Herndon, however, Fosterattributed this commitment to practical concerns rather than ideological convictions. In the early 1990s, she maintained that blacks might not have challenged segregation if “separate but equal” had lived up to its promise. James White, whose family moved outside the county during the crisis years, recalled a generational divide in opinion in which the majority of those opposed to the desegregation campaign were older people who had more to lose and whose incomes depended most directly upon their relationship with the white power structure.2 BlackresidentsusedPECCA toworktowardtherestorationofpublicschools, engineera comprehensivevoter registration campaign, and supervise the placement of older students in accredited schools.Theyalso utilized their new group to set up study-play groups for the remaining children and coordinate “the efforts on a county-wide basis of those organizations, groups and individuals interested in restoring public education.” Like countless other civil rights groups forming across the nation, Prince Edward activists chose the designation “Christian Association” as a declaration of the confluence of biblical faith and the crusade for racial justice, as a public relations tool, and as a strategy for We Suffered Our Children to Be Destroyed { 39 drawing upon the flourishing social, political, and voluntary networks of the black church.3 Members immediately elected Rev. L. Francis Griffin president and Rev. A. I. Dunlap of Beulah A.M.E. Church first vice president. Edwilda Allen—a 1951 strike leader who saw her mother, Vera, fired from her teaching position in retaliation—was elected secretary. Aware of the national significance of the county’s struggle, members vowed that “what we do in Prince Edward County, we do not alone for ourselves, but for all disadvantaged and underprivileged people everywhere.” As the force behind the local NAACP chapter, Griffin had strong ties to officials of the Virginia State Conference NAACP, who looked upon the new group as a vehicle for “implementing the work of the NAACP in the county.” He served as the NAACP’s Special Project Coordinator for Prince Edward, and won election as president of the State Conference of Branches in 1962.4 Given their long involvement with the struggle in Prince Edward, State Conference leaders reacted with alarm when the Virginia Christian Leadership Conference (VCLC), an affiliate of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), proposed a controversial plan to encourage federal intervention in the county. SCLC executive director Wyatt Walker and VCLC president Rev. Milton Reid approached Griffin and theVirginia State Conference in February 1961 with their vision for a massive “Sit-In On Congress.” Theorizing that the sight of Prince Edward residents would encourage Congress to take action on a relief bill, they insisted that a mass sit-in could “generate enough moral pressure through the molding of public opinion that the case entered in behalf of the children of said county by the NAACP might be given priority on the court docket and a clear decision rendered.”5 Both the NAACP and PECCA went on the record in vocal opposition to the proposal, on the grounds that it diverted attention from the critical task of maintaining educational programming for the children. Chief counsel Oliver Hill told Griffin that such a move would be “ill-advisable at this time” and that he would advise all plaintiffs in the case to refrain from participation. As Griffin wrote Wyatt Walker, “The Legal Staff is of the opinion that our chances for getting justice in the courts is better now than it has ever been since the inception of the Case.” This explanation aside, organizational rivalries and personal slights undoubtedly played a role in the...

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