The GDS-Farmville Exchange: Virginia’s “Massive Resistance” Made Personal

After Virginia’s Prince Edward County shuttered its public schools to defy court-mandated integration, a group of GDS 9th graders initiated a dialogue with Black students in the Commonwealth that sparked an exchange of visits to one another’s turf.

The partnership began to take shape in early 1961, after Edythe Rich’s 9th graders read that officials in Farmville, Virginia, had effectively exiled Black students from the education system. The Supreme Court had outlawed public school segregation years earlier, but local leaders in Farmville found a workaround. Having exhausted their legal appeals, they leveraged Virginia’s “Massive Resistance” laws to padlock every public school. They then funneled taxpayer dollars into all-White private academies.

When her stunned 9th graders asked if such a thing could really be true, Edythe’s response was direct: “I said there was only one way to find out, and that’s to go down there.” She contacted Helen Baker at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), which had established “training centers” for Prince Edward’s Black children, and arranged a visit.

On April 10, 1961, eight GDS students packed into two cars for the drive to Farmville. Arriving in town, they felt an immediate tension. “It was one of those really prickly experiences because as we walked down the street, there were people watching us and not saying a word. Their eyes followed us all the way down,” Edythe later recalled. “Mrs. Baker [our chaperone] kept saying, ‘nobody’s going to hurt you. They never hurt the Quakers.’ … It felt uncomfortable.”

The GDS group visited makeshift classes in basement rooms and church halls where space was so tight that students had to sit on one another’s laps. Despite the dire surroundings, the students found common ground. GDS student Bobby Shelton told the Associated Press that he played baseball with his newfound friends. His classmate Laverne Franklin said she talked to her peers about popular songs, and some boys who would have been in junior high school told Jimmy Dworker that they had never talked to White children “as friends” before.

The visit culminated in a lunch meeting that was supposed to last one hour but stretched well past that, according to an archived report by Mrs. Baker. “The pupils themselves were not willing to stop at so short a period, so the conference went on from 1:00 to 4:30,” she wrote. “... [For nearly all the Farmville children] this was the first interracial experience with students of their own age they had ever had.”

The dialogue did not end in Virginia. Two months later, on June 5, GDS families hosted 29 Farmville youngsters for a two-day visit to Washington. After a picnic at nearby Battery Kemble Park and an evening baseball game, the visitors—ages 11 to 18—spent the next day at the U.S. Supreme Court. As they entered the crowded cafeteria for lunch, with Mrs. Baker in the lead, she sensed their trepidation.

“I want them to feel easier about a building like this,” she told The Washington Daily News. “And I also want them to feel the freedom of this room, not to feel they have to crowd into a corner of it. I want them to not have so much fear of white people as they did when they got up this morning.”

Other stops included Capitol Hill, the Washington Hebrew Congregation, the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the Islamic Center of Washington, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian Institution. In the afternoon, GDS hosted a lunch for the students and a trip to Glen Echo Park, which had integrated only a month earlier following intense protests.

While Massive Resistance was a statewide policy, Prince Edward County remained its most extreme and longest-lasting adherent. As reported by The Washington Post, the county’s 1,800 Black children were barred from public schools from 1959 (when the Supreme Court denied Prince Edward’s request to delay the desegregation mandate) until federal courts finally forced the schools to reopen in 1964.

The irony is that the local shutdown was the final stand against a movement Farmville itself helped ignite; a 1951 student strike there led to one of the five lawsuits that formed the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling that outlawed school segregation.