In this letter, dated August 20, 1959, the Reverend L. Francis Griffin writes, as the president of the Prince Edward County Christian Association, to President Dwight D. Eisenhower asking for his help in enforcing an end to segregated schools in Prince Edward County. The county Board of Supervisors was flouting the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision to desegregate public schools. The president’s deputy assistant sent a response to this letter on August 29, 1959.
In this letter, dated April 8, 1962, L. Francis Griffin writes to Sarah Patton-Boyle expressing despondency over the prospects of truly ending segregation. Griffin was a leader of the Black freedom struggle in Prince Edward County. Sarah-Patton Boyle was one of Virginia’s most prominent white civil rights activists during the 1950s and 1960s. He writes to her after the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors voted, in June 1959, to defund the public schools, thus locking approximately 1,750 Black children out of an education. Griffin’s stress over finding formal education for these Black children took an emotional and physical toll on him, culminating in the hospital stay that he refers to in the letter. Griffin made national fundraising appeals to support activity centers as a stop-gap measure while the schools remained closed. When Griffin asks about the book that Boyle had mentioned in a previous letter, he may be referring to the Desegregated Heart: A Virginian’s Stand in Time of Transition, an autobiography she published in 1962.
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