The first segregation academies were created by white parents in the late 1950s in response to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in "Brown v. Board of Education" (1954), which required public school boards to eliminate segregation "with all deliberate speed" (Brown II). Because the ruling did not apply to private schools, founding new academies provided parents a way to continue to educate their children separately from blacks. At that time, most adult blacks were still disfranchised in the South, excluded from politics and oppressed under Jim Crow laws. Private academies operated outside the scope of the "Brown v. Board of Education" ruling and could therefore have racial segregation. Virginia's massive resistance to integration resulted in Prince Edward County, Virginia closing all public schools from 1959 to 1964; the only education in the county was a segregation academy, funded by state "tuition grants."