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What happened next had been foreshadowed years earlier. The county’s white leaders responded exactly as they had warned. Defying the new court order, the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors announced it would eliminate the county’s entire education budget, thereby closing all twenty-one white and black public schools. The operating principle of ethical governments—“do no harm”—was roundly ignored. It was better to abandon schools, county leaders decided, than for white children to sit in a classroom next to black classmates.

“It is with the most profound regret that we have been compelled to take this action,” the board said in a statement. The board suggested that it “should not bring about conditions which would most certainly result in further racial tension and which might result in violence.” The board added that the schools had been closed “in accord with the will of the people of the county.”

Gordon Moss, an associate dean at Longwood, denounced the decision as “unchristian” and an act of “unintentional evil.” The Ministerial Alliance of Farmville and Vicinity urged the supervisors to rescind it, saying it was “contrary to the simple laws of decency, the American ideal of democracy, the Christian concept of justice, and the moral law of God.”

A Prospect man, J. V. Lewis, had no sympathy. “The condition that has been brought about here is due to the colored people themselves,” he declared, “and they’ll just have to suffer it.”

“We have reached the point of no return,” Farmville’s mayor, William F. Watkins Jr., said.

The doors were chained and signs were posted:

SCHOOL PROPERTY

NO TRESPASSING

UNDER PENALTY OF LAW

PRINCE EDWARD CO. SCHOOL BOARD

The county’s three thousand students were locked out.

Governor Almond offered his support for the county’s leaders, saying, “What Prince Edward has done is in conformity with Virginia’s law… . The locality is under no legal compulsion to appropriate money for public education. Those who object to the action of Prince Edward have only to thank the NAACP and the courts which do their bidding.”

The NAACP promised to vigorously fight the closings. “The people of Prince Edward will not be abandoned by this organization in their quest for their constitutional and human rights,” said W. Lester Banks, the secretary of Virginia’s NAACP branch. Oliver W. Hill also promised to defend the black residents. “We believe that public education is the cornerstone of American democracy,” he said, “and we propose to pursue every legal and constitutional means to preserve it in Prince Edward and everywhere else in Virginia.”

Prince Edward’s leaders had followed through on threats made five years earlier, making a once inconceivable response to a Supreme Court decision a reality. It would forever change the county and affect black families in heartbreaking ways, halting—and sometimes ending—black children’s educations and breaking up families who would send their children away to school.

Ultimately, the county’s youngest residents would pay the steepest price.

Our school was not the first one

To be built of hopes and dreams

With walls of high convictions

And with faith for her beams.

First to leave the old ways,

The first to dare to try;

Fought for with such assurance,

How could they think she’d die?

Prince Edward stepped a new way,

Made history at her start;

She’s first in strength and courage,

And the first in our hearts.

—PRINCE EDWARD ACADEMY ALMA MATER

I left for college thinking that my grade school experience—and my community—was normal. I didn’t realize how sheltered I had been. The white academy I attended didn’t admit black students until I entered eighth grade. By the time I graduated, my circle had barely expanded. I was still isolated from blacks and other people of color.

A boy at my school called me “nigger lips,” and I spent middle and high school thinking they were something to be ashamed of. When police accused a black teenager of taking the cassette player from my banged-up Hyundai Excel, he reinstalled it and my parents agreed not to press charges. After that, the radio never worked properly, and I had a personal reason to associate black men with crime.

Mary Washington College, an hour south of Washington, DC, wasn’t particularly diverse, but I made my first Latina friend within hours of my arrival. I was immediately drawn to Flavia Jimenez, but I didn’t know what to make of her. She spoke Spanish on the phone to her parents, who grew up in Argentina and Peru, and she had traveled the world. Her life was endlessly different from mine, and that appealed to me.

Studying Spanish in high school hadn’t made sense to me, because I had never left the country. It had never even occurred to me. My parents didn’t have passports either. I was a small-town girl, still dressed in preppy cable-knit sweaters, a satin bow tied around my curly blonde ponytail. I was loud, hyper, and overly enthusiastic. It was the only way I knew how to be.

A whole new world opened up to me in that first semester of college when I enrolled in a journalism class. I introduced myself to the professor, Steve Watkins, and I followed him to his office. He asked me where I was from, and I tried to compose the story of my hometown. But I had never learned the full history and I muddled the explanation, confusing segregation and desegregation. I was embarrassingly uninformed.

Still, something clicked. From that day forward, I was a reporter. I learned to think for myself, to question authority. Watkins instructed his journalism students to fact-check even our most basic assumptions. Repeating a journalistic mantra, he told our class, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

I worked for the college paper, the Bullet, writing stories about black students’ complaints that they had been forced to walk through a metal detector before a concert at the Underground pub. I reported a story on public funds set aside for tutoring black students that weren’t available to whites. For the first time in my life, I was considering issues of race.

In my naďveté, I assumed that the school’s administrators were always truthful, if not forthcoming. One afternoon in the Bullet’s dingy offices, as I hung up the phone after an interview, I declared a college vice president to be “nice.” Watkins exploded, visibly irritated that I had just been worked over. “The hell with nice!” Watkins snapped. “Nice doesn’t mean good!”

He was responding to my childlike sense of the way the world worked, in which civility was valued above all else. “People will nice your story right out of your hands,” he told me. “Don’t be a sucker like that.”

Watkins’s lesson would still resonate twenty years later. Prince Edward County’s leaders were well-mannered Southern gentlemen. They had also closed the schools. Nice doesn’t mean good.

AFTER COLLEGE, I LEFT VIRGINIA, which for all its beauty felt oppressive. I headed west, breaking free of the traditions and expectations under which I had been raised. I landed a reporting job with an Oregon newspaper.

My move across the country surprised my parents. In Farmville, people tend to stay put. They might attend college in western Virginia or live in Richmond in their twenties. But move anywhere else and no one back home can understand why. One of my mom’s classmates, a former member of the county board of supervisors, bragged that he had only left the state twice. Life in this small town insulates and protects its residents, making them forget there is a world beyond southern Virginia. But I couldn’t wait to get out of Farmville and figure out who I was supposed to be.

Although a Southerner in a strange land, I made friends quickly, and the new surroundings opened my mind to different ways of looking at the world. I took an interest in Oregon’s growing Latino population. A Spanish-speaking neighbor explained the discrimination they faced. He translated for me so I could interview the parents of a teenage boy killed in burgeoning gang violence. Two years later, I moved to San Diego, one of the most diverse places in America, to work as a reporter for the San Diego Union-Tribune. My closest girlfriends were Asian and Latina, and I also made black and gay friends. I dated guys who weren’t white. My life in Virginia seemed far behind me.

Yet the learning curve was steep. My Filipina friend, Crissy, gently informed me that although rugs are Oriental, people are Asian. She was allowed to mock Asian drivers but I was not. One night when we were dancing in a mostly black crowd at a downtown club, I told her I felt awkward. Imagine how I feel always being the only brown person in the room, she responded. Another time, when I described my brother’s tall, athletic girlfriend as all-American, she questioned the term. What made her all-American, she asked. Her blonde hair and light eyes?

With Crissy’s gentle nudging, I regularly confronted how much I still had to learn. Having friends of color, gay friends, and immigrant friends that faced various forms of discrimination opened my eyes to the ways that I benefitted from white privilege. The growing awareness changed my focus at work, too. I was curious about the experiences of those people the newspapers overlooked. I teamed up with Crissy, a photographer at the paper, to produce stories about people of color, the poor, and the disenfranchised. We wanted to show readers the world that existed beyond their front doors, to inspire them and invite them to engage with their neighbors. I wrote stories about diverse communities in which people of different cultures interacted. But my attention wasn’t always well received. When I covered San Diego’s black community, many interviews were rife with tension, my journalistic focus unwelcome.

Living in a county with a large Spanish-speaking population, minutes from the Mexican border, I began to believe that learning the language was essential. I realized how many doors would open, how many stories I would be able to report and write, if I could communicate in Spanish. I signed up for night classes and started planning an extended trip to study in Latin America. Soon after, Crissy and I took a weekend trip to San Francisco, and I met Jason.

I couldn’t have predicted that ten years later we would move back to the South, together.

BY THE LATE SPRING OF 1959, Prince Edward County’s public schools were officially closed, and white leaders were suddenly facing a three-month deadline to ready their private school for the coming academic year. Classrooms had to be prepared for more than 1,500 white children countywide, and money needed to be raised to pull it off. It seemed like an enormous feat.

The first step was bringing in money, Robert T. Redd, the longtime headmaster of Prince Edward Academy, told me. The white academy had already raised about $11,000 before the board of supervisors’ historic vote to end public education in 1959, and its directors wanted to secure an additional $200,000 that had been pledged years earlier. The private school foundation would also be supported by tuition grants from the state and tax credits from the county. The board of supervisors in 1960 would adopt a tuition grant law that provided one hundred dollars for each child from county funds and allowed taxpayers to donate up to 25 percent of their real and personal property taxes to a private school. After one year, a federal judge found this aid for segregated schools to be illegal.

It was also time to appoint the school’s leadership. The Prince Edward School Foundation’s president, B. Blanton Hanbury, who had served as president of the Farmville Elementary PTA, approached Redd, who worked as a shop teacher at Worsham Elementary, a white public school south of Farmville, and asked him to come on board. Redd had already met many of the school’s leaders, but more important, he was willing to do whatever it took to get the school open.

On July 1, Redd and the Worsham principal, J. Boyd Bagby, became the school’s first two employees. The pair didn’t know the first thing about starting a school from scratch, and Redd wanted to get advice from others who had already accomplished what they were about to do. He and Bagby drove north to Warren County to spend a day at another school formed to avoid integration, the John S. Mosby Academy, which had more than four hundred students attending classes in a converted restaurant and a new four-room building. The school was among the South’s first segregation academies.

In Warren County, administrators explained to Redd and Bagby the task they were about to undertake, walking them through each step. They should create an organizational schedule. They needed to determine an annual cost per student, set salary scales, and hire a bus service. They would have to line up facilities that could provide classroom space, and they’d have to furnish the rooms with desks and blackboards. They needed to secure schoolbooks and purchase paper and bathroom supplies. Redd and Bagby returned to Farmville overwhelmed and nervous. But at least they had a better understanding of the daunting task before them, and they spent three hours briefing the school’s governing committee.

In mid-July the board appointed a retired oil executive, Roy Pearson, to lead the school initiative. A businessman who had worked for years with Standard Oil, establishing offices abroad, Pearson was an answer to the board’s prayers. He treated the school like a business start-up.

Robert Taylor offered the third floor of a building he owned downtown at the corner of North and Third Streets, near the Farmville Herald building, as office space for the school. Redd crossed the street to ask neighboring businesses for donations of surplus furniture to fill the empty floor. He partitioned off the space to create three distinct offices and arranged for the telephone company to install lines. Then he hired a secretary.

Redd figured that since churches weren’t in use on weekdays, they would be the most appropriate hosts for the new school, though it meant all the classrooms wouldn’t be under one roof. Redd, Bagby, and Pearson fanned out across the community, asking leaders of the many churches to borrow their Sunday school rooms.

The foundation secured insurance policies for each of the buildings and signed rental agreements with the owners. The Farmville Presbyterian Church offered its basement and first floor, which gave the school space for an office and a guidance counselor. The school also planned to house students at the United Methodist Church, Farmville Baptist Church, Farmville Moose Lodge, the Farmville Woman’s Club House, and a vacant phone company building. The owner of the town’s white movie theater, State Theater, agreed to let the school hold assemblies there. The foundation also planned to have one school in each of the county’s five magisterial districts outside the town of Farmville, and churches such as Pisgah Baptist Church offered space.