Browsing by Author "Lagerquist, Jonathan"

From 1959 to 1964 the public schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia, remained closed. The schools had been closed to avoid complying with federal court orders requiring that the county desegregate its public schools. Segregation of public schools had been found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in its 1954 landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The Prince Edward public schools were closed for five years until the Supreme Court in 1964 found that the school closures were unconstitutional in Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County. This Master s Thesis explores the legal battle that arose out the Prince Edward school closures. The purpose is to determine how the county was able to defend the closures during the lengthy litigation. The source material consists of briefs filed before the courts, where the involved parties present their arguments. These documents are found in the collection the Papers of Allan G. Donn, housed at the Special Collections and University Archives, Patricia W. and J. Douglas Perry Library, at Old Dominion University Libraries, Norfolk, Virginia. In addition, the several court rulings handed down during the litigation are examined. By analyzing this source material qualitatively, the litigation is reconstructed and analyzed. The Prince Edward school closures have received relatively little scholarly attention. The research that has been done on the Prince Edward school closures focuses on how proponents and opponents to the closures acted politically, in the public discourse, and on a grassroots level. This thesis will therefore explore an aspect of the closures that has heretofore been largely overlooked. In addition to casting light on a previously overlooked part of the Prince Edward school closures, this thesis also provides a new interpretation of the county s defense of the closures. Previous research has attributed the effectiveness of the county s strategy to keep the schools closed due to the lack of a constitutional requirement in regards to public education. While segregation in public schools had been found unconstitutional, public education nevertheless remained within the states purview. This study supports this claim, however it elaborates on how the involved parties and courts tasked with ruling on the closures perceived the role of public education within the American system of federalism. This thesis finds that the school closures represented a conflict between a conservative and a progressive view of the Constitution. According to the governing case law at the time, it was permissible under the Constitution for a county to abandon all public education. In order to reopen the schools, the courts had to employ new and innovative interpretations of the law of the land. This thesis also shows that the county s defense of the closures was more dynamic than has previously been believed. The closures were not only defended by relying on traditional interpretations of the Constitution, but also utilized a procedural defense that was aimed at prolonging the closures. This strategy played an important role in keeping the county s public schools closed for such an extended time period. This aspect of the litigation and its effect on extending the time period the county was able to operate no public schools has not been previously noted. This survey of the legal defense of the Prince Edward school closures shows that the defense was more versatile than has previously been believed. The American system of federalism and the duel court system with state and federal courts were exploited in several ways to keep the county s public schools closed. In order to reopen the schools, new, and to some extent radical, interpretations of the Constitution had to be employed.