Content area
Full text
Southern Stalemate: Five Years without Public Education in Prince Edward County, Virginia. By Christopher Bonastia. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. xii, 337. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-226-06389-8.)
The story of the 1951 school strike in Prince Edward County, Virginia, that led to an NAACP lawsuit and inclusion in the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) case has been memorialized in film and historical accounts. But we know much less about the later struggles, from 1959 to 1964, when the county's public schools were closed to thwart the enforcement of Brown. Christopher Bonastia says that this gap in movement historiography (as in contemporary media accounts) may be a result of the isolated geography and rural poverty of the county, which also helps explain the paucity of local direct-action activities like sit-ins and marches and the lack of reactionary physical violence and disorder that might have caught the attention of northern journalists. In addition, the rhetoric of national leaders was seldom heard in Prince Edward County. Martin Luther King Jr....