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Article: Recovering a "lost" story using oral history: the United States Supreme Court's Historic Green v. New Kent County, Virginia, decision.
- Article from:
- The Oral History Review
- Article date:
- June 22, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Oral History Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Abstract In 1965, New Kent County, located just east of Richmond, Virginia, became the setting for the one of the most important school desegregation cases since Brown v. Board of Education. Ten years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared "separate but equal" unconstitutional, both public schools in New Kent, the George W. Watkins School for blacks and the New Kent School for whites, remained segregated. In 1965, however, local blacks and the Virginia State NAACP initiated a legal challenge to segregated schools, hoping to initiate desegregation where the process had yet to begin and to accelerate the process in areas where token desegregation was the norm. In 1968, the ...