In response to the court's holding in
Brown v. Board of Education,
Virginia initiated a coordinated policy known as
massive resistance to maintain segregationist policies. A legislative package known as the
Stanley Plan was enacted. Numerous public schools had been closed through the tactics of
massive resistance. However, when the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors was ordered to integrate the public schools under its jurisdiction in June 1959, it took the unusual and extreme step of not appropriating
any money for the school system, forcing all public schools in the county to close for the next five years. Instead of funding public schools, Prince Edward County provided tuition grants for all students, regardless of their race, to use for private nonsectarian education. No private schools existed for blacks, resulting in the total deprivation of formal education to black children in the county from 1959 to 1963. The District Court initially refrained from ordering the schools opened pending the separate question whether the Virginia state constitution required the operation of public schools. In 1962, the District Court ordered the county board to fund the schools. The Fourth Circuit reversed, holding that the District Court should have awaited the state law determinations of whether the county was required to operate schools. The black schoolchildren appealed to the Supreme Court. The case was argued by
Robert L. Carter for the NAACP (
Samuel W. Tucker and
Frank D. Reeves on the brief); Virginia assistant attorney general R.D. McIlvaine (Attorney General
Robert Young Button and Assistant Attorney General
Frederick Thomas Gray on the brief) and Judge
John Segar Gravatt for the school board, and Solicitor General
Archibald Cox argued on behalf of the United States as an
amicus curiae, urging reversal. ==Decision==