RESOURCES
PLACES
Queens College
The Queens College Virginia Student Help Project was a targeted civil rights initiative that took place in the summer of 1963, organized by students and faculty at Queens College, part of the City University of New York. The project was a direct response to the educational crisis in Prince Edward County, Virginia, where public schools had been closed since 1959 to resist desegregation. The students involved in the project sought to support the African American children who had been denied formal education for nearly four years.
Led by Norman Fruchter and Danny Perkel, and with assistance from Queens College faculty, a group of 16 student volunteers—many of them white and Jewish New Yorkers—traveled to Farmville, Virginia in July 1963. They stayed for six weeks, working in churches, homes, and community centers to provide basic instruction in reading, writing, math, and science. These were not formal classrooms but makeshift learning environments where students could begin to recover from years of educational deprivation. The volunteers also brought books, supplies, and a sense of solidarity to the families they served.
The project operated during a particularly tense summer. It overlapped with the July 1963 civil rights protests in downtown Farmville, where local students and activists marched for the reopening of the schools. The Queens College students joined these efforts not only by teaching, but by bearing witness and helping raise national awareness. Their work was covered by The New York Times and other national media, which helped expose the injustice of the school closings to a broader public.
Though the project was short in duration, its impact was profound. It strengthened ties between northern student activists and southern civil rights leaders and laid the groundwork for further educational relief efforts, including the federally supported Prince Edward County Free Schools that opened later that fall.