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J. Barrye Wall, the editor and publisher of the Farmville Herald, had little to say about the Free Schools. “We have never been happy about the lack of schools for Negroes,” he told U.S. News & World Report. “We do not oppose education for Negroes. We just oppose integrated education.”

Gordon Moss, the Longwood dean who had publicly derided the school closings, was the first white parent to enroll his son. He hoped it would encourage other whites to send their children to the Free Schools. Moss had never explained to his son, Dickie, a seventeen-year-old rising senior at Virginia Episcopal School in Lynchburg, why he had opposed the school closings, but Dickie understood how much his father had sacrificed. When his father asked him to consider leaving boarding school to attend the Free Schools, Dickie immediately agreed. His father warned the six-foot-tall young man that classroom time would be devoted to helping the black children catch up. He told his son that he might not do a lot of book learning that year, but he would learn about people from the experience. In the group of twenty-two seniors, Dickie Moss told me, “I stood out like a sore thumb.”

William W. Tews, a white tobacco farmer, and his wife registered their eight-year-old daughter, Letitia. After officials at the white academy learned that the couple planned to send their daughter to the Free Schools, they offered to help pay for her education. Her parents declined because they believed that school should be free for all children, and their response was met with threats. The girl’s mother was told in a store, “Your head will be cut off if you let Letitia go to school with the niggers.”

McCarthy Eanes, a twenty-year-old black student who also worked as a bus driver for the Free Schools, told his supervisor about two white children, Brenda and George Abernathy, who lived up the road from him and might attend. Sullivan went to visit the children’s father, a tenant farmer who had recently moved from Portsmouth, Virginia. He wanted to send his children to public school. Sullivan assured him that he would keep his children safe, and their father agreed to send them to the Free Schools. “My parents were not prejudiced people,” George Abernathy said. “They were salt of the earth people.”

Betty Lewis and her brother, Thomas Lewis, who had spent four years in the tobacco fields helping their dad, were also enrolled. When the academy had called on their father, Walter Lewis, “Daddy told them straight up he didn’t believe in segregation,” Betty told me.

On the first day of school, Eanes drove Brenda and George to class. They sat directly behind him on the bus. He had been instructed not to open the doors for anyone. As he pulled up to the schools and joined the line of buses, photographers and reporters jostled to get on. Eanes focused on his instructions from school officials—do not open the doors for anyone. A pair of teachers was waiting to escort George and Brenda to their classrooms when his bus pulled to the front of the line.

At 9:00 a.m., children gathered around the flagpole at Mary Branch No. 2, the former Moton High School. The children were quiet as the American flag went up. Inside the building, the school bell sounded for a full thirty seconds, a symbolic tribute to the four years it had remained silent.

Sixteen hundred children, all but a few of them black, had returned to the classroom. Half were attending school for the first time in their lives. Sullivan delivered the opening prayer. “We ask you to bless the students,” he said, “and to encourage them to take advantage of an opportunity denied them for four years—one which, we pray, will never again be denied an American child.”

WHEN MCCARTHY EANES WENT BACK to the classroom, school was a distant memory.

For four years, he and his siblings had stayed home without an ounce of education. One of twenty-one children, he had spent the time helping out in his family’s tobacco fields, like the other kids who were old enough to work. His dad had a first-grade education and couldn’t read or write, but he was good at math, and he had done all right for himself. He worked as a logger and a tobacco farmer, and he had purchased three hundred acres of land behind Moton High School in the community of Worsham. He didn’t think his children needed more schooling. McCarthy’s mom, Gertrude, had finished sixth grade, and she wanted her kids to be educated. But with so many children—as many as fifteen in school at one time—it seemed fairest, and most affordable, to keep them all home when the schools closed.

During the long hiatus, there had been no training centers or informal schooling for McCarthy. But not finishing school nagged at him. He wanted to go back for his senior year and get his high school diploma. His father relied on him at the farm, but he didn’t try to stop his son. His mom supported him, too. McCarthy had applied to drive the bus so he could make some money while he was a student.

Betty Jean Ward also joined the senior class of the Free Schools. Her parents thought it was for the best, even though she had been attending school in Nottoway for four years with her new friends. She was torn about whether to return to Prince Edward, but after spending the summer protesting in Farmville, she wanted to stay home. She found that the schools were nicer than when she had left, and there was new equipment and new books, donations sent from around the country. Dickie Moss was her first white classmate.

The teachers were highly qualified, and administrators bought an army surplus bus and took the students on field trips to Appomattox and Charlottesville. They went to New York, where they met the mayor, toured the United Nations, and ate lunch in Jackie Robinson’s home.

Everett Berryman had been attending school in Appomattox for years. He had returned to school there and was driving a bus when, two weeks into the new school year, his dad announced the family would be moving back to Prince Edward, and he would go to the Free Schools. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Everett thought. He had settled in and made a life in Appomattox. Now he was starting over again.

Griffin’s son, Skippy, came back, too, joining the sophomore class after spending the summer demonstrating in Farmville with other students. Since the schools had closed, he had moved back and forth between Prince Edward and Newton, Massachusetts—just outside Boston—where he stayed with a black host family arranged by the American Friends Service Committee. He went to Newton High School, one of the best in the country.

Skippy decided to attend the Free Schools after he heard that Dickie Moss had enrolled. Griffin thought that Skippy’s return would send a good message to other families in Prince Edward. Plus, the students had talked about continuing the demonstrations during the school year, even though Griffin didn’t want them to. Skippy wanted to be close by for the outcome of the pending Supreme Court case in which he was a plaintiff, Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County. The district judge Oren Lewis had ruled in the case that tuition grants be discontinued but did not address whether closing the schools violated the Constitution.

JUST WEEKS INTO THE SCHOOL year, President Kennedy was shot and killed, breaking the hearts of those in Prince Edward who credited him with opening the Free Schools and who had counted on him to get the public schools reopened.

Sullivan moved into a house five miles south of Farmville, where he continued to be harassed. People drove down the long semicircular driveway to his home early in the morning, blowing their horns and dumping garbage on his lawn. He and his wife began sleeping in separate bedrooms, reasoning that their two college-aged sons deserved at least one surviving parent. When a shotgun blasted through a bedroom window late one night, the superintendent dove under his bed and stayed there until the smell of gunpowder cleared.

After a weekend away, he returned home to find the yard covered in trash, the tires of his Buick convertible slashed, and the car’s roof and rear window destroyed. The local police did nothing, he later wrote, and one officer even suggested that black youngsters were rebelling because Sullivan made them work too hard in school. “This is just their way of letting you know they don’t like it,” one of the officers told him.

Ultimately, federal marshals were assigned to protect him and his staff, and a threat against a white teacher from the North brought the Federal Bureau of Investigation to town. “It was a living hell,” Sullivan said later.

Students at the Free Schools signed a scroll that was delivered to Jacqueline Kennedy. “Our beloved President John F. Kennedy once considered us in our distress,” it read. “We, the students of Prince Edward County Free Schools in Farmville, Virginia, think of Caroline, John, and Mrs. Kennedy in their sorrow. It is also ours.”

They collected donations for the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library. In the spring of 1964, Bobby Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, flew to the county for a four-hour visit—Colgate Darden met their plane. As Darden guided Kennedy and his wife through the Free Schools, the attorney general was “quiet and uncertain” as he met with parents and talked with students, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported, noting that Kennedy accepted a package tied with a red, white, and blue bow that contained thousands of pennies. Kennedy warmed up when a throng of Longwood students blocked his motorcade through downtown, getting out of the car and shaking hands before heading to Hampden-Sydney College, where he had been invited to speak.

Two weeks after the attorney general’s visit, on May 25, 1964, the US Supreme Court finally took action that would reopen Prince Edward’s public schools. During the four years the schools were closed, 1,100 black children had received no formal education, the Michigan State researcher Robert L. Green found. Only twenty-five black children had enrolled in full-time school between 1959 and 1963, he found, writing that the school closings may have had “irreversible effects” on the children.

The prior December, the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals had upheld Prince Edward County’s decision to close the schools, declaring that the county had no duty to operate public schools and finding that there was no provision in the Virginia Constitution or state law that prohibited the payment of state and local tuition grants.

But the Supreme Court, ruling in Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, found the school closings to be unconstitutional. The court ruled that the county’s decision to close all public schools while providing tuition grants and vouchers to white children to attend private schools denied black school children equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. “The time for mere ‘deliberate speed’ has run out, and that phrase can no longer justify denying these Prince Edward County school children their constitutional rights to an education equal to that afforded by the public schools in the other parts of Virginia,” the court found.

The nation’s highest court ordered Prince Edward to reopen and desegregate its schools. It also found that a district court could require the county supervisors to levy taxes to raise funds for a county school system, and it outlawed Virginia’s tuition grants to private education.

Ten years and eight days after the Brown decision, the county’s black leaders finally got the answer they sought. Black children and their families had paid a heartbreaking, life-changing price.

IN JUNE, WEEKS AFTER THE ruling, the county board of supervisors set aside $375,000 for schools, $180,000 of it for tuition grants for the academy. A month later, the board held a late-night meeting.

Elsie was working at my grandparents’ house when a call came in about the special meeting. Papa was still at work and Elsie was in the basement ironing when Mimi answered the phone. “I can’t believe it’s happening,” my grandmother said into the phone, giddy.

Later that night, hundreds of academy patrons gathered at the town armory to accept grants that were being handed out in secret. A federal judge was expected to issue an injunction the next day to block distribution of the funds, and, to get around the ruling, the supervisors planned to immediately issue 1,250 tuition grants. Parents buzzed with excitement as they waited for the checks to be cut at 2:00 a.m. “You would have thought an atomic bomb went off,” Robert Taylor recalled.

That morning, the town’s three banks opened early for parents to cash the checks “before a new court order could stop them,” Taylor said. Women wearing dresses and men in suits with hats or short-sleeved dress shirts lined up outside Peoples National Bank on Main Street, waiting to deposit the public funds into their own accounts. Two years later, a federal appeals court ordered the supervisors to return the money. The county asked parents to repay the grants, but some parents refused—or simply couldn’t afford to do so. Still $68,000 short in 1967, the supervisors unhappily sued the parents who still owed money.

Not much had changed in Prince Edward. The Free Schools, always intended to be temporary, closed down, donating some of their supplies and leftover money to the public schools. When the public schools reopened that fall, only eight of the 1,500 students were white. But nationally, change was afoot. In July 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, enacting the most sweeping nondiscrimination legislation since Reconstruction. It ended the use of Jim Crow laws, prohibiting discrimination in hotels, in employment practices and union membership, and in programs that received federal aid. Johnson called on the American people to “eliminate the last vestiges of injustice in America.” He implored the nation, “Let us close the springs of racial poison.”

I’M SITTING IN THE COOL, dark living room of a house I’m renting in Farmville for the summer, flipping through a thin phone book, looking for the number of one of my high school teachers. I have moved to town to get a feel for what Farmville is like today, to ensure that my views are not filtered through my parents’ experiences.

I spotted Peggy Cave two days earlier, sitting across the aisle at Farmville Baptist Church at the fiftieth anniversary of the kneelin. We greeted each other, and I asked if she had been in church the day of the protest, and she told me she had been singing in the choir. She agreed to talk with me about what happened.