Brown’s Battleground: Students, Segregationists, and the Struggle for Justice in Prince Edward County, Virginia by Jill Ogline Titus, and: Student Activism and Civil Rights in Mississippi: Protest Politics and Struggle for Racial Justice, 1960–1965 by James P. Marshall (review)

The 1950s and 1960s marked the rise of youth participation in the civil rights movement. Their dedication, perseverance, and sometimes fatal sacrifices are without compare. Two recently published books examine the role of student activism in local and statewide movements.

In the twenty-first century, America’s public education system faces tremendous battles. Public schools are closing in some of the nation’s biggest cities, and privatized schools are taking their place. And in many places, school populations are even more racially divided than in the years prior to the Brown case. Educational equity in America, therefore, is a matter of real importance today, and Jill Ogline Titus’s, Brown’s Battleground offers a timely historical perspective on the subject. Set in Farmville, Virginia, Titus’s account of school closings reveals the complex intersections of race, politics, and educational policy.

The story of the Prince Edward County school system begins on August 31, 1951, when students at the Robert Russa Moton High School, the only black high school in the county, organized a strike. Together with the local chapter of the National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), students went to the county school board and requested better facilities, a revised curriculum, and greater community investment in the education of black students. As a result of the students’ unwavering spirit and determination, national NAACP leaders selected Moton students as the plaintiffs in the first lawsuit against challenging school segregation in the state of Virginia. Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County eventually became one of the five state lawsuits to make up the Brown v. Board of Education case. Unfortunately, the path to desegregation was cut short after the Supreme Court’s favorable rulings, as the Prince Edward public school system closed its schools between 1959 and 1964. This, in turn, left a generation of schoolchildren, primarily African Americans and poor whites, without access to an education. In response, a group of black and white citizens worked together to overturn the school board’s decision.

Titus’s assessment of this “educational tragedy” offers a closer look at Virginia’s unique interpretation of Jim Crow laws and practices. The ideological paradigm, better known as the “Virginia way,” enforced segregation on the basis of “separation by consent” (11). Unlike white segregationists from neighboring southern states who utilized violence to enforce segregation, those living in Virginia relied on less physical means. Southern tradition, social pressures, and lessons drawn from interactions with insubordinate blacks were used in order to maintain the color line. Nevertheless, the closing of Prince Edward County public schools encouraged a group of local citizens and outside organizers to challenge the “Virginia way” on the count of educational equity.

Titus’s interest in the active response of Farmville residents to the educational disparities between wealthy whites and low-income whites and African Americans led her to research organizations like the Prince Edward County Christian Association (PECCA) and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). These organizations, along with a handful of others, sought to overturn the county’s ruling. The efforts of these organizations are best represented in the AFSC’s Emergency Placement Program. This program relocated hundreds of children to cities both near and far to attend school. Her overview of the placement programs captures the personal, familial, and communal sacrifices endured by many in an effort to provide Prince Edward children, primarily black youth, a proper education.

The intraracial tension among white residents is one of Brown’s...