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"When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Prince Edward County, Virginia, home to one of the five cases combined by the Court under Brown, abolished its public school system rather than integrate. Jill Titus situates the crisis in Prince Edward County within the seismic changes brought by Brown and Virginia's decision to resist desegregation. While school districts across the South temporarily closed a building here or there to block a specific desegregation order, only in Prince Edward did local authorities abandon public education entirely--and with every intention of permanence. When the public schools finally reopened after five years of struggle--under direct order of the Supreme Court--county authorities employed every weapon in their arsenal to ensure that the newly reopened system remained segregated, impoverished, and academically substandard. Intertwining educational and children's history with the history of the black freedom struggle, Titus draws on little-known archival sources and new interviews to reveal the ways that ordinary people, black and white, battled, and continue to battle, over the role of public education in the United States"--

This article analyzes a set of fifty-five interviews conducted with black teenagers during the summer of 1963 in Prince Edward County, Virginia: site of the nation's most determined attempt to circumvent the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education through abandoning public education altogether. Caught up in currents larger than themselves, the teenagers' thoughts on subjects such as the term "black," the effectiveness of nonviolence, and the actions and motivations of white people offer a rare window into the minds of youth defining their own personhood against the backdrop of a rapidly changing world. Historians know relatively little about civil rights figures like the Prince Edward children, who were simultaneously protesters and victims. Many were thoroughly politicized by their experience, becoming either active resistors or thoughtful commentators on American race relations, while others remained unwitting participants in Prince Edward's civil rights drama.