Desegregation of Public School In 1963

Desegregation of Public School In 1963

Introduction

The desegregation of the public schools in Virginia began on February 2, 1959, and continued through early in the 1970s when the state government's attempts to resist desegregation ended. During this period, African Americans in Virginia pushed for desegregation primarily by filing lawsuits in federal courts throughout Virginia. This litigation was aimed at achieving court rulings forcing the state of Virginia and its local school districts to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, mandating the desegregation of public schools. State and local officials, however, generally resisted efforts to bring about desegregation and utilized their political power to avoid and then minimize public school desegregation. Virginia's Indians, meanwhile, went without the benefit of any state-funded public education until 1963, almost a decade after Brown.

Discussion

Early Desegregation Efforts

Virginia's public schools had been segregated racially since their inception in 1870. So, too, were the state's public colleges and universities. Through local organization and the ballot, black Virginians were able to pressure state and local authorities to provide support for their schools. Following the disfranchisement of black voters in the Virginia Constitution of 1902, however, funding for black schools fell far short of what white schools received, and the discrepancies in salaries for teachers and administrators were stark.

The segregation of public schools went beyond issues of black and white. Members of Virginia's Indian tribes were also largely excluded from public education. While many tribes established mission schools early in the twentieth century, these schools often only went up to the seventh grade. Meanwhile, many Indian children, whose help was needed at home or in the fields, never made it past elementary school. Public high school was available only to Indians who were willing to attend blacks-only schools, and most refused. They did this in an effort to maintain their cultural identity in the face of of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which had deemed almost all Indians, for legal purposes, to be black. A number of the Powhatan tribes sent their children to the Bacone School in Oklahoma and to other such facilities, where they could complete high school and go on to earn the equivalent of a community college degree. Public schools were not opened to Virginia Indians until 1963.

The principal black civil rights organization in the first half of the twentieth century was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which sought the desegregation of public education from its inception. The NAACP's legal team in the 1930s began to challenge these inequalities in education. One early victory occurred in Norfolk in 1940, when the courts agreed that the city had to pay black and white teachers equitably. NAACP lawyers in Virginia continued to employ this strategy of challenging inequalities in numerous other school districts, and the pace of litigation accelerated after the close of World War II (1939-1945).

Brown and Massive Resistance

Early in the 1950s, the Virginia state NAACP joined the national organization (based in New York City) in ...