A co-defendant in the original desegregation suit, the county had prepared for the inevitable showdown. When legal delay and evasion were no longer possible, the burden of educating the county’s 1,400 white children was shifted to the Prince Edward Educational Foundation, organized in 1955 to operate a private school system. Churches and lodge halls now serve as classrooms, staffed by former public school teachers under contract with the Foundation.
On New Year’s Day, before some 2,000 Negroes in Richmond, the visiting Rev. Martin Luther King of Montgomery, Alabama, intoned the 1960 battle-hymn: “We will wear down the resistance of the whites by our capacity to suffer and love.” Not only the appeal of a Gandhian strategy of passive suffering caused Negroes to reject the white offer of private schools; there was also the suspicion that segregationists wished to test the validity of the legally uncertain tuition law with minimum risk to their own schools.
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