History
After the United States Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that public education must be racially integrated, the Prince Edward County school board closed all of its schools. Fuqua School was subsequently founded in 1959 as "Prince Edward Academy" in response to pending integration, part of a strategy known as massive resistance. Over the next few years essentially all of the white children in the district were attending the Academy.
The public school system in Prince Edward County remained closed between 1959 and 1964. The United States Supreme Court decision Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County with a vote of 9-0 outlawed the allocation of public funds through tuition grants to fund race-discriminating institutions. When public schools were reopened in 1964 and integrated, Prince Edward Academy stood as an option for families who did not want to participate in integration, thus continuing racial tension among citizens. Because Prince Edward Academy did not accept non-white students, it lost its tax-exempt status in 1978 and began to suffer financially. It was not until the late 1980s that it ended its policy of discrimination and admitted students of other races. While there was little public outcry, private opinion was very mixed. Its association with "old money" and discrimination in the past still causes some tension in the Farmville community, especially among non-whites and students of the local public schools.
By the early 1990s, with aging technology, a very small alumni contribution base, and an increasing debt, Prince Edward Academy was nearing financial collapse. In 1992, former local resident and businessman J.B. Fuqua donated about 10 million dollars to pay off debts and install necessary improvements to the school, such as air conditioning and computers. The school was transformed at that point with new administration, new mascot and school colors, in addition to the school name change. Until his death in 2006, Mr. Fuqua donated thousands of dollars to the school each year and regularly visited the school and its students.
In 2008, in order to improve its reputation in Farmville, Fuqua offered African-American high school football player Charles Williams a full scholarship to the school if he would agree to promote it in the town's black community. As of December 2011, fifteen of Fuqua’s 420 students are black.
Read more about this topic: Fuqua School
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