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. All private schools in the region remained racially segregated. A private foundation proposed opening a private school for black children, but the offer was rejected in part because many of the black residents of Prince Edward County wanted "to continue the legal battle for desegregated public schools." In 1963, "federal, state, and county authorities cooperated to have classes conducted for Negroes and whites in school buildings owned by the county," but the county-funded schools remained closed until the Supreme Court's 1964 ruling on the litigation arising from the county's 1959 closure of the schools. In 1959, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit had ordered the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to require that the schools open without segregation. 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 ; Virginia assistant attorney general R.D. McIlvaine 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
The Supreme Court, in a decision authored by Justice Hugo Black, ordered the schools reopened. It held that the supervisors' action of refusing to fund the public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, where the county offered only private school vouchers for students and where no private schools accepted black students. This case marked the first time that the Supreme Court ordered a county government to exercise their power of taxation. This unusual level of intervention in the function of local government provoked a dissent by Justices Clark and Harlan:
