Author Jill Ogline Titus will be the guest speaker for the February 6, 2012 Brown Bag Lunch at the Talbot County Free Library St. Michaels branch at noon. Ms Titus is the author of the book “Browns Battleground, Students, Segregationists, and the Struggle for Justice in Prince Edward County, Virginia.”

When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Prince Edward County, Virginia, home to one of the five cases combined by the Court under Brown, abolished its public school system rather than integrate. Titus situates the crisis in Prince Edward County within the seismic changes brought by Brown and Virginia’s decision to resist desegregation. While school districts across the South temporarily closed a building here or there to block a specific desegregation order, only in Prince Edward did local authorities abandon pubic education entirely–and with every intention of permanence. This talk will explore the seismic shift unleashed by Brown v. Board of Education, the cost of the county’s course of action, which cut across racial lines to harm nearly every man, woman, and child in Prince Edward, and the creative ways that ordinary people, black and white, struggled to rebuild both their schools and their community.

Jill Ogline Titus is associate director for the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College. Brown Bag Lunches are sponsored by Friends of the Library and patrons are invited to bring their lunch and enjoy coffee and sweets provided by the library.

Library programs are free and open to the public. For more information, call the library at 410-745-5877, or visit www.tcfl.org

BROWN BAG LUNCH
February 6, 2012
noon

St. Michaels branch of the Talbot County Free Library
106 Fremont St.
St. Michaels, MD 21663
Phone: 410-745-5877