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Background
In 1964, New Kent County, located just east of Richmond, remained a largely rural and undeveloped county. Many residents worked in the pulp wood industry while others found employment at the paper mill or outside the county. The racial makeup in the community was almost 50 percent black and 50 percent white. While there was very little interaction among the races, there was also little of the violence that marked the civil rights era in other southern locales. Ten years after the U.S. Supreme Court declared “separate but equal” unconstitutional in
Brown v. Board of Education, both public schools in New Kent County the George W. Watkins School for blacks and the New Kent School for whites remained completely segregated, a policy the county and its school board deliberately maintained. This began to change, however, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which, in part, threatened to curtail federal funding to localities refusing to integrate their schools