Outsider Tactics in the School Desegregation Fight: The Case of Prince Edward County, Virginia.

This paper assesses the battle over school desegregation in Prince Edward County, Virginia, the only locality to close its schools for an extended period (five years) rather than desegregate them. A 1951 strike at Moton High School by local students against the inferior condition of black schools led to Prince Edward becoming one of the five cases decided in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). When the county faced a final desegregation order in 1959, it closed public schools, reopening them only under a 1964 Supreme Court edict. Much of the battle over school desegregation in PEC took place in courtrooms. After the 1959 school closings, a sustained campaign of direct action did not take place until Summer 1963. This paper assesses whether an earlier and more sustained emphasis on direct action might have pressured Prince Edward County authorities to reopen public schools before 1964. After analyzing the obstacles to launching a direct-action campaign in the county, I evaluate the likelihood that such a strategy would have produced tangible results. While the drama of sit-ins, demonstrations and boycotts has drawn the preponderance of media and scholarly attention, understandings of the civil rights movement are incomplete without more sustained analysis of how legal mobilization strategies--the pursuit of movement goals through litigation--interacted with these outsider tactics. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]