When you hear the term Farmville, you probably imagine a video game. Few know of the history of Farmville, VA in the fight for civil rights. We know of the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown vs Board of Education. Most of us may be under the impression that desegregation of schools followed. But that was not the case. Farmville, VA might be the epicenter of resistance to the Supreme Court decision.
Following the Brown decision, the leadership in Virginia unleashed a policy of massive resistance. Five years later, schools in Prince Edward County had still not been desegregated. When a federal judge ordered the schools to integrate, the county’s school board decided instead to close all the schools.
For five years, black children had no school to attend. At the same time, the school board used state funds to open private schools for white children. It wasn’t until Edward R. Marrow, one of the nation’s most respected journalists, brought the nation’s attention to the closing of public schools.
Local churches and Quakers stepped up to educate the black children. It took the U.S. Supreme Court another five years to order the school to reopen. Even with the reopening of the schools, desegregation was slow to happen. True integration did not occur until the early 70s, sixteen years after the Brown vs Board of Education ruling.
Sally Kohn, in her book The Opposite of Hate, calls what happened in Farmville systemic hatred. Such forms of hatred are encouraged and enabled by our institutions and their practices. Systemic hatred remains pervasive in our society. Some of this hatred remains hidden from view, but it’s there in virtually every one of our public and private sectors.
While we would like to think that we are eroding the impact of systemic hatred, the reality is that this form of hatred is growing. It is being enabled by algorithms of bias, artificial intelligence-generated justifications, but most of all by spurious interpretations of a nearly 250-year-old document we call the U.S. Constitution.
Just imagine the systemic hatred of the last few years. Elite universities have had their hands tied when it comes to admitting a diverse freshman class. Women are facing systemic hatred, as they can no longer make what they consider the right decision about their bodies. Access to voting is under attack. Algorithms are being used to propagate hatred. And many more examples could be cited.
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“Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated.”–George Bernard Shaw