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When we moved to Richmond, choosing a neighborhood with an excellent elementary school wasn’t yet a priority. The girls were toddlers, and school was barely on our radar. Yet we liked that the neighborhood school was diverse. When our girls enter kindergarten, we will benefit from renting a house in a zone with a revered elementary school and engaged parents. Before walking their children to class each morning down wide wooden hallways, parents chat in front of the century-old brick elementary school while the children play in the grass and ride scooters. Parents devote hundreds of hours to volunteering for the PTA, a fund-raising machine that can bring in tens of thousands of dollars in a single night to support the school’s programs.

If Jason and I had chosen to live in a neighborhood in Richmond with an elementary school that wasn’t as highly regarded, I would have worked to make the school better, volunteering in my daughter’s classrooms and joining the PTA, or we would have applied for our children to attend a different public school. But most middle-income Richmond parents who are comfortable sending their children to a public elementary school in their neighborhood—and plenty are not—tend to move to the suburbs for middle school or enroll their children in one of the region’s many private schools. There is a sense that, in the upper grades, kids without learning or behavioral problems go unchallenged in Richmond Public Schools’ classrooms. Many parents aren’t willing to risk putting their children in that position, and, by middle school, they have tired of a curriculum that seems to revolve around standardized tests. Thus the number of children leaving Richmond’s public schools every year is about half the number who enroll.

Many white children in this city never set foot in a public school. They follow in the footsteps of their parents and grandparents, attending private schools from the moment they hit kindergarten. This private school pipeline contributes to the racial disparity of the public schools, the same way my alma mater does in Farmville. Richmonders, like many in Prince Edward and around the country, have effectively given up on public school education. And the abandonment of Richmond’s public schools by white and middle-income parents creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of schools that continue to perform poorly.

But when I consider how I might respond to Amaya or Selma being ignored or bullied in a public school setting, Redd’s words echo in my ear: “You’d do the same thing.”

He’s probably right. Jason and I would find another option in a heartbeat. A private school, perhaps. We want what’s best for our children, just as my grandfather did for his.

Elsie’s Other Life

Elsie had worked as a housekeeper for our family for as long as I could remember. Before that, she worked for my grandparents for as long as my mother and aunt could remember. As a child, I never imagined that Elsie had a life before us.

Elsie Mary Anderson was one of seven siblings, born in 1926. She grew up six miles outside Farmville in Hampden Sydney, in a mixed-race community just beyond the gates of the all-male Hampden-Sydney College, founded in 1775. Elsie’s father, John T. Anderson, worked as a chef at the college, and Elsie was sometimes allowed to accompany him to work. At home, she played with white and black children.

At first, the family lived in a rental house, but her father saved to build a two-bedroom wood home with front and back porches, becoming the first black homeowner Elsie knew. He bought a television, too, and their neighbors and friends from church came over to watch boxing.

In high school, Elsie began dating a man seven years her senior. Melvin Lancaster, a cousin of her older sister’s husband, was good in algebra and offered to help her with homework. She graduated from high school in 1945, and she wanted to go to college. Instead, she married Melvin and gave birth to Gwen the year after she graduated. While many of her siblings would move—north to Massachusetts, south to North Carolina—Elsie made Prince Edward County her home.

When Gwen was small, Elsie stayed home with her in a little house in Farmville. Then, around 1954, she filled in for her injured mother-in-law cleaning Mimi and Papa’s house and looking after my mom and her siblings, and they later offered the job to her. Melvin didn’t want Elsie to take it. He preferred her being at home, and he didn’t want her working for a white family. But once she started earning money, Elsie never left. She liked the freedom the job gave her. She didn’t want to have to ask Melvin every time she needed a few dollars.

She lived two blocks away from my grandparents on West Third Street, in a wood house on a hill. Several mornings a week, she walked to Mimi and Papa’s brick house, where she would vacuum, iron, and help my grandmother care for the three children, nine-year-old Chuck, my five-year-old mother, and Beverley Anne, the newborn baby.

Mimi sometimes left Elsie alone with the children, slipping on white gloves and driving with a friend to Richmond for lunch and shopping at the downtown department store, Thalhimers. While Mom and her brother were at school, Elsie would dress my aunt, Beverley Anne, and brush her hair with a soft-bristled brush. Then they would walk downtown to the five and dime, J. J. Newberry Department Store. Elsie wasn’t allowed to sit at the counter, but shopping was acceptable. Elsie and Beverley Anne would wander around the store until it was time to get the girl home. At naptime, Elsie pulled the child onto her lap or sat next to her on the bed, reading a story.

Occasionally Mimi and Papa would host bridge parties and ask Elsie to work at night. They set up three card tables in the living room, and Elsie would serve the guests and refill drinks. On New Year’s Eve, she would stay with the children so Mimi and Papa could attend a party, and when they returned home at 2:00 a.m. with another couple, Elsie would prepare an early morning breakfast of eggs, bacon, and sausage.

But on days Mimi was home, she did the cooking herself. She would serve Elsie’s lunch at noon, which Elsie ate alone, seated at the round table in the sunny breakfast nook. By the time my grandfather walked in the back door at precisely 1:10 p.m., Elsie was back at work, ironing in the basement. Papa would sit on the green pleather cushions at the same table where Elsie had eaten. Mimi had already swept away the crumbs and laid out his plate of food.

WHITES IN PRINCE EDWARD DIDN’T want their children going to school with black children, but, like whites all over the South, they were plenty comfortable having black women work in their homes. The domestic landscape of my grandparents’ house looked similar to other professional families in town. White families typically hired black women to help with the laundry, the cleaning, the cooking—especially if they had children to care for. Some had their help come every day, while others shared housekeepers. Elsie split her time between my grandparents’ house and the home of another family. Whites were comfortable with the intimate relationship they had with housekeepers as long as blacks knew their place. For Elsie, these unspoken rules meant not discussing the school closures and riding in the backseat when my grandparents drove her home.

In public life, the rules were stricter. In Farmville in the 1950s, just about every aspect of life was segregated. The churches were separate. Blacks and whites didn’t eat in the same restaurants. Their children attended separate schools. They swam in adjacent lakes at a state park. They didn’t sit together in the movie theater. One movie theater was just for whites; the other theater allowed blacks to sit upstairs. Water fountains and restrooms were separate. Often, the black facilities—if they were even offered—were grossly inferior. At many restaurants, blacks could order food for take-out but there was nowhere for them to eat inside. They weren’t permitted in the library’s reading room, either. Even the creek that ran through town was segregated. Black kids played in it one day, whites the next. For the most part, blacks and whites lived in distinct but close neighborhoods. They also had separate shopping districts, though blacks often shopped in white-owned stores and were given credit to buy the things they needed.

Across the South, most blacks didn’t even speak to whites on the street—not unless they were spoken to. A black man was expected to keep his head low, avoiding eye contact if he passed a white woman. It’s hard for me to imagine that this kind of divided society was the norm at the time, almost one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation. But the Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which ruled that people of African ancestry were not and would never be eligible to be US citizens, had profound implications. Though the case was never overruled, the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, gave equal citizenship to freed slaves and promised them “equal protection under the law.” After Reconstruction, whites tried to take back the power they had lost by adopting laws state by state to legally enforce segregation that disadvantaged blacks.

Though the 1875 Civil Rights Act entitled all races to equal treatment, an 1883 Supreme Court decision clarified that the law did not apply to private persons or corporations. In 1892, Homer Plessy, a mixed-race man, challenged that ruling by boarding a train and sitting in the whites-only car. After years of appeals, the Supreme Court ruled in 1896 that “separate” facilities for blacks and whites were constitutional as long as they were “equal” and were not a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Plessy v. Ferguson decision signaled the federal government’s unwillingness to challenge segregation. It also upheld the constitutionality of the states’ Jim Crow laws, which mandated segregation in public venues such as restaurants, hotels, beaches, theaters, and restrooms. Facilities for blacks were often inferior, if they even existed. Southern politicians worked to further restrict blacks from voting and to make them ineligible to serve on jury pools or run for office by instituting poll taxes, literacy requirements, and grandfather clauses that restricted the right to vote to people whose ancestors had voted before the Civil War.

WHEN THE SCHOOLS CLOSED IN 1959, Elsie had been working for my grandparents for five years. Yet my grandparents never talked with Elsie about the decision or its ramifications, even though her daughter, Gwen, was twelve and her school was closing, too. A few times, Gwen accompanied Elsie to my grandparents’ house, where she played with my mother. But my grandparents didn’t ask where Gwen was the rest of the time.

As the white community was enjoying its newly opened academy, Mimi made an offhand comment. Elsie and her friends should “get a group together and open up a school,” Mimi told her. Elsie understood exactly what Mimi meant. My grandmother hoped the black community would follow in the white leaders’ footsteps “so we wouldn’t be bothering them to integrate.”

Elsie never told her friends or family what my grandmother had said. She didn’t dare mention it to Melvin, either. His cousin John Lancaster had been a PTA leader who had urged county leaders to improve the black high school, and his support of the student walkout had cost him his job as a county extension agent.

Elsie knew if she told Melvin, he would have made her quit working for Mimi and Papa. He didn’t like his wife working for my grandparents in the first place. But Elsie wanted to keep the job. She went about her work as if nothing was wrong.

Most white parents felt good about what they were doing for their children, and they told themselves that they were doing right by black children, too. Without discussing the idea with black leaders, Prince Edward School Foundation officials announced in June 1959 that they would be willing to create a private school for black children. When there was no response from black leaders or parents, white leaders acted baffled. They seemed not to comprehend that the offer came across as disingenuous and was contradictory to the black struggle for integration.

White leaders moved ahead with their idea anyway. When, in December, the black community hadn’t made plans to educate its children in a private school, the white academy’s leaders chartered Southside Schools for black children. They secured a certificate of incorporation from the State Corporation Commission and made an announcement in the Farmville Herald. The black private school’s board consisted of the same white leaders who headed the new white academy, including Robert E. Taylor and J. Barrye “Bo” Wall Jr., the son of the Herald’s publisher and a lawyer, who predicted that six hundred to eight hundred black children would apply.

Roy B. Hargrove, the president of the board, sought applicants by sending a note to the parents of every black student in the county. The letter said that the location of the schools would be determined after applications had been received. The board intended to set up good schools and get qualified teachers. Hargrove wrote to parents that the private black school would run the full academic year “so that the Negro children of this county will not lose time from school.”

The idea of a black private school apparently didn’t have the backing of a single black leader in the community. Many believed the white school leaders were bluffing because no funds had been raised for a new school and school buildings hadn’t been identified.

Griffin despised the white leaders’ idea. “The very fact that they did not call in any responsible Negro leaders to plan the school would indicate that there were no good intentions,” Griffin said.

Others suggested that white leaders wanted to start a black private school only because it would help sustain the white academy. If black students also applied for state-funded tuition vouchers to attend a black private school, the vouchers—which white parents needed to help finance tuition at the white academy—might not be deemed unconstitutional, white leaders thought. They also believed the school board would be more willing to go along with their plan to buy public school buildings if some were sold to a black private school.

The NAACP attorney Oliver W. Hill Sr., who attended a Christmas party for black children in Prince Edward County on December 23, days after the letters about Southside Schools were mailed, considered the white leaders’ efforts downright duplicitous. He told the five hundred people in attendance that he viewed the proposed creation of a black private school as an attempt to derail desegregation efforts, and he urged them to boycott it.