Locked Out
by Alfred L. Cobbs, Ph.D.
From 1959-1964, Prince Edward County, Virginia, closed its public schools rather than desegregate them, as ordered by the Supreme Court in the 1954 Brown v Board of Education decision. Alfred L. Cobbs, a rising tenth grader at the time, was one of the causalities among the African American students of the “locked out” generation. In Locked Out, Cobbs chronicles his struggle for an education in the face of this traumatic experience. With the support of a sympathetic family who lived outside the county, Cobbs was able to finish high school. In college, he found refuge in the study of and immersion in the German language and culture, which aided him in finding his way existentially, and ultimately led him to a rewarding career as a professor. Locked Out is a testimony of human perseverance and triumph against the odds.
“A powerful account of courage, determination, and loss. The racially-motivated closure of the Prince Edward County public schools altered the trajectory of Alfred L. Cobbs’s young life, forcing him to seek an education and future far from home. His moving personal story is continuing testimony to the extraordinary courage and determination exhibited by a generation of young Black students whose lives were forever changed by county authorities’ embrace of massive resistance.”
—Dr. Jill Ogline Titus, author of Brown’s Battleground: Students, Segregationists, and the Struggle for Justice in Prince Edward County, Virginia
“Locked Out is a must read and an undeniable inspiration.”
—Lacy Ward Jr., Founding Director of the Robert Russa Moton Museum in Farmville, VA
“Some of our greatest heroes are men and women most of the world has never heard of. Alfred L. Cobbs is such a hero. His memoir, Locked Out, is a study in the triumph of the human spirit, the indefatigable journey of an indomitable soul who refused to allow the storming racism thundering around him to extinguish the light that it was his destiny to shine.”
—Ken Woodley, author of The Road to Healing: A Civil Rights Reparations Story in Prince Edward County, Virginia
“In Locked Out, Alfred L. Cobbs joins a chorus of authentic voices who lay bare the personal toll of Southern resistance to the U.S. Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education. Cobbs takes readers on his journey from being denied the opportunity of an education to triumphantly obtaining a Ph.D., beginning with the nightmare experience of physically being locked out of school by public officials in defiance of the Brown decision when he was a teenager. This memoir is a powerful lesson in the triumph of the human spirit in the face of adversity.”
—Cheryl Brown Henderson, Founding President, The Brown Foundation for Educational Equity, Excellence and Research; and daughter of Oliver L. Brown, plaintiff, Brown v Board, for whom the case is named
