1937- Powhatan’s first Black high school opens and is later renamed Pocahontas High School.
1940s and 50s- Utilizing money from the community but also from state and federal sources, Powhatan adds buildings to house younger Black children, moving most away from the one-room schoolhouses that had been utilized previously
1954- The United States Supreme Court issues its Brown vs Board of Education ruling, which declared that education separated along racial lines was inherently unequal. Alumni of the all-Black Pocahontas have affirmed that while the teaching excellence, communal nurturing and commitment to high standards were central to their schooling at Pocahontas, they regularly lacked resources that were available to their white counterparts at Powhatan School. Southern states, like Virginia, devised myriad ways to avoid integrating schools
1959- Neighboring Prince Edward County, Virginia, became the only public school division in the country to shutter all of its schools rather than integrate; Powhatan’s Board of Supervisors threatened to follow suit and close all schools rather than comply with integration
1962- Black students from Pocahontas, along with their parents, filed Bell v Powhatan in response to delaying tactics that kept Black students segregated; in Powhatan, one of those tactics became hiding the transfer forms Black families needed to complete to have their children attend school at Powhatan. The Board of Supervisors also threatened to shut down all of the public schools if even one Black child were admitted to Powhatan. The BOS approved the school budget on a monthly basis instead of yearly as a way of tightly controlling the schools and barring integration. The BOS also moved to allow any white child to use public funds to attend the newly-established, private, all-white Huguenot School.
1963- The courts ruled in favor of the Pocahontas School families—requiring Powhatan to integrate. According to newspaper headlines of the time, what was most stunning about the court ruling was that ordering that the superintendent, school board members and BOS members were expressly barred from doing anything that might shut down the school system in the way neighboring Prince Edward had done. This was considered by some scholars a death blow to Massive Resistance. On appeal, the Fourth Circuit didn’t just uphold the lower court ruling, but it also awarded attorney’s fees to the lawyers representing the Pocahontas families. The message was clear—counties would not be allowed to skirt the law to avoid integration and money would not be a deterrent for families seeking justice for their children. Both the injunction against school closure and the award of legal fees set a new precedent in the fight for equal education.
1969- The school system became fully integrated, and what was Pocahontas School transformed into Powhatan Middle, serving diverse students from across the county; this was the site of the beginning of racial healing after so many contentious years. Many alumni of the middle school, post-integration, have remarked on how far race relations in the county came in a short period of time, once students of different racial backgrounds were able to attend school together and truly get to know one another.