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But when I get her on the phone, she seems irritated. “I’m just so tired of this subject I could scream,” she tells me. “I am tired of rehashing this thing. I just want to move on.”

I tell her that I have heard the same comment from a number of white residents of the county. She responds that I would hear it from a lot of black people, too, if I asked “the right people.” Her tone grows increasingly condescending to me.

“Some people just want to keep on and on and on,” she says. By “some people,” I know she means me. I can almost feel her staring over her glasses at me like she did when I was her student. “It’s been said a million times,” she adds.

Now I’m annoyed, too, and ready to hang up, but I keep her on the line, hoping for a thread of information about my grandparents. She briefly opens up, expressing remorse that the schools closed. “I regret this whole situation,” she tells me. “I regret that we imported slaves. There’s a lot of things we did wrong in the past.”

My frustration is mounting with people who tell me Farmville’s story doesn’t need to be shared. She has said it was wrong, yet she doesn’t want to talk about it.

“Weren’t you a history teacher?” I ask, incredulous. “How can it be wrong to discuss history?”

A classmate of mine recalled Mrs. Cave telling her students that buses integrated not because of Rosa Parks but because white women wanted their maids back and were tired of being inconvenienced by the Montgomery bus boycott. My friend remembered, years earlier, a different academy teacher conceding that the North had won the Civil War, adding that she was “Southern born and Southern bred and when she died she’d be Southern dead.” Another academy graduate recalled that after she asked to write a report on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the groundbreaking antislavery novel, she was told to pick another book because “we don’t read black authors.” I think about how my classmates and I deserved a more balanced version of history, a chance to reflect on our town’s—and the South’s—past. How even now Mrs. Cave is shutting down the conversation and preventing deeper reflection.

Her message is loud and clear: She’s done talking about this, and she thinks I should stop, too.

Building a Life Without a Foundation

The black children whose educations were halted became known as the Lost Generation. Fifty years later, many still can’t talk about what happened during that time. Not with their siblings, let alone with strangers. They carry around shame and sadness and anger, buried deep inside for decades. They don’t swap stories with their sisters about where they were sent when the schools closed or talk to their brothers about working in the fields. They don’t say how they were supposed to graduate high school but instead became dropouts, through no fault of their own.

Reopening those old wounds hurts. Even the “Lost Generation” label hurts. They don’t feel lost. They have survived. Some have even thrived.

FOR YOUNGER CHILDREN, LIKE TEN-YEAR-OLD Ricky Brown, who had not yet begun his education and had no academic foundation, school would always be difficult. At the Free Schools, Ricky’s teacher fussed at him instead of patiently explaining how he should do his work. The next year, when the public schools reopened, it was more of the same.

Ricky was poor, and his teachers wrote him off, applying the same low expectations that black children too often face in school today. “They knew where I was from and knew I’d been left behind,” he told me. “They couldn’t hold back a whole class to help me.”

His mother was busy working and she didn’t have a car, so she rarely visited the school. It seemed that no one believed he would amount to anything. “For a while, I was beginning to believe that myself,” he told me. He struggled without encouragement, trying to learn to read. The little boy who had been so excited to start school now despised it. “I didn’t want to go because I didn’t know what was going on in my classes,” he remembers.

He had no confidence in the classroom, but he was a star on the athletic fields. Ricky shined in football, basketball, and baseball. Playing sports, he felt like he mattered. His mother never came to his games—she was usually working to support the family—but the coach took an interest in him, talking to college recruiters on his behalf. Ricky was offered scholarships to play basketball for three colleges, but when he looked around at the other high school seniors, he realized they had significantly more schooling than his seven years. If he was struggling now, he knew he wouldn’t be able to handle the college workload.

He graduated from Prince Edward County High School in 1972, a stellar athlete but a demoralized, underachieving student. He still had a year of high school athletic eligibility left, but he couldn’t stomach another year of classes, even if it meant he could play sports. “I’d had enough,” he said.

He felt lost. Then he met his future wife, Shirby Scott, who had been raised by more progressive black parents. She grew up in a neighboring county and rarely traveled to Farmville as a child. “Black people just shouldn’t be in an area that didn’t want black people to be educated,” her parents told her.

She was one of eight children, all of whom went to college. Scott saw something in Ricky that she hadn’t seen in the college guys she knew. Ricky wanted to marry her, but he also wanted to be able to provide for Scott and her young son. That’s when he had a tough realization—high-paying jobs are reserved for people with college degrees. “If I can’t get a better job, I’m not going to marry you,” he told Scott.

He finally landed a job as a guard at the Virginia Department of Corrections, which paid well, and the couple wed. When Ricky started his new career, he made up his mind to become a different man. He was not going to “be dumb” anymore. Every day he tucked a red miniature dictionary into his shirt pocket. Up in the watchtower, overlooking the corrections yard, he would pull out the dictionary and learn a few new words.

“Anytime I had a free moment, I would flip it open and just read,” he said.

Still, each time he needed to take a routine test at the corrections department, he became nervous and upset. It was like being back in school all over again. “It’s just reading,” his wife would reassure him. “You can pass this.”

He left the corrections position for a job as one of Farmville’s first black police officers. A few years later, he took a higher-paying job with the power company.

At the end of his career, he would become a school resource officer, working day after day in the very school system that had denied him an education and a sense of worth. He founded an after-school program to mentor middle school boys like him.

He still thinks every day about what he might have accomplished if he had started school when he should have.

“Where would I have been,” he wonders, “if my foundation had been built?”

WHEN THE SCHOOLS REOPENED, DOUG Vaughan was already married with a child. His wife JoAnn had become pregnant at sixteen, and neighboring Cumberland County, where she went to school, wouldn’t allow pregnant girls to attend classes. It was important to Doug that she finish high school and get the education he had been denied. She was too smart not to graduate, and he was already thinking of the next generation of Vaughans. JoAnn’s grandmother, a retired teacher, petitioned the Cumberland County School Board, gaining permission for JoAnn to attend school while pregnant. “I didn’t want my kids to grow up uneducated,” Doug told me.

After JoAnn gave birth to their baby daughter, she started skipping school. Doug adjusted his work schedule from a 5:00 a.m. to a 10:00 a.m. start so that he could walk her to the bus stop each day to make sure she climbed aboard. “I wanted her to finish at all costs,” he told me.

When JoAnn graduated in 1964, the family moved to New Jersey so that Doug could find a better-paying job. He landed a position sewing children’s clothes at a garment factory. At night, Doug attended school, working toward his GED. But, before he could earn the degree, he had to learn to read. When they got married, JoAnn hadn’t realized how much difficulty he had reading, so good was he at hiding his weaknesses.

JoAnn worked to help him become a better reader. At night, they sat in bed, taking turns reading Harlequin romance novels aloud to each other. “I was so embarrassed. It was pathetic,” Doug told me. “I’m a grown man, married, and I can’t read.”

It wasn’t just his lack of education that was weighing him down. He was burning with a hatred for white people, who he believed had made it difficult for him to earn a living to support his family. “I blamed them,” he told me.

Eventually Doug and his family returned to Virginia, where Doug worked for years as a brick mason and learned construction, building a house for his family. When construction jobs dried up, he applied to work with the Virginia Department of Corrections, which paid good salaries and provided benefits. After he completed the training academy, his instructor took him aside. “You barely made it through,” the instructor told Doug, suggesting that he was not a good candidate for promotion and advising him not to bother trying.

The instructor’s words were heartbreaking. “I hated him telling me that’s as far as I could go in life,” Doug told me. “I had always dreamed of doing something good and being recognized for it.” He made up his mind to prove the instructor wrong.

“This guy,” he told himself, “I am going to make a liar out of him.”

And so Doug did.

In the prison system, he was promoted through the ranks. In 2005, he was named warden of a high-security prison in a neighboring county, becoming the first officer in the state’s prison system to be promoted to warden with only a GED, he said. As the top administrator of Nottoway Correctional Center, he was responsible for the safety of 1,400 prisoners and managed a $26 million annual budget. He also oversaw a work center that housed inmates who were eligible for work release.

As much as he had accomplished, he still wanted more. Over the years, he took college classes at a local community college and at Longwood, but his job was too demanding to keep at it, and he still didn’t have a college degree. When the state rolled out a program that paid tuition for residents denied an education by massive resistance, he enrolled in Saint Paul’s College, transferring the credits he had accumulated. Now he meant business. “This time I will not give it up,” he told himself. “I’ll give up corrections first.”

In 2008, he graduated with a master’s degree in business administration, one of the proudest moments of his life. A few months later, he retired. But for all Doug accomplished, none of it erased what he had endured as a child. He still considers what might have been. “I always wondered, ‘Where would I be if I had gone to school, completed it, and gotten a college education?’” he said. “Where would I be in life?”

GWEN LANCASTER WOULD NOT MOVE back home, no matter how much Elsie begged and pleaded. A teenager by then, Gwen had settled into her new life in Cambridge, and she didn’t want to come home even for the summers. Her aunt and uncle had three young children when Gwen moved in.

“She just became part of our lives,” Elsie’s sister told me. “We didn’t even look back.”

Gwen would stay in Massachusetts for decades. Elsie never got to be her mother again. Not the way she wanted.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

—WILLIAM FAULKNER, REQUIEM FOR A NUN

“We Are All God’s Children”

As much as Mimi’s and Papa’s rejection of desegregation frustrated me, I accepted on some level that they were products of their time. But when it came to my parents, I had a harder time understanding their decision to return to Farmville and to send my brothers and me to the segregation academy they had attended.

My parents left Farmville when they graduated high school and headed off to Virginia colleges, Dad in 1965 and Mom in 1968.

My dad grew up poor, eager to escape his overprotective grandmother and her strict religious beliefs. For seven years, he and his three younger brothers had lived with Epsie Vale in her rural farmhouse. When the thick admission packet arrived in the mail from the University of Virginia, Dad was thrilled. He couldn’t wait to put sixty miles between him and his rigid home life. He left Prince Edward County believing that blacks weren’t as intelligent as whites, a country belief as deep as the work ethic he also had learned. Granny Vale could be critical, but she had taught him not to disparage anyone. “We’re all God’s children,” she told her grandsons.

In the bucolic rolling hills of Charlottesville, he was exposed to different ways of looking at the world. He encountered few black students at the University of Virginia, and he believed the ones he met were exceptional. After graduating in 1969, he moved to Richmond to attend dental school at the Medical College of Virginia, now Virginia Commonwealth University, which had graduated only two black students. The urban campus felt foreign and frightening after growing up in Farmville and spending four years in Charlottesville.

He ran into my mother one morning on the dental school campus, where she was visiting her brother, also a student there. My mom had followed in the footsteps of her brother and father, attending the University of Richmond. Dad mentioned to her that he had never visited the campus. “You should come out and see me,” she told him, so he did.

They married in 1971 and moved into a university apartment for married students in Richmond, then a city writhing with racial animosity. In April, a federal district judge had ordered a citywide busing program after the Supreme Court had approved the measure to integrate schools. Twenty-one thousand children would be bused in the new school year to bring each of the district’s schools into a balance of 70 percent black and 30 percent white.

Dad spent the summer working for the city’s Department of Recreation in Creighton Court, a public housing community. It was the first time my dad had ever been around blacks. At first he thought he would never be able to differentiate one child from another. But in a few weeks, he knew most of the children by name and had developed a good rapport. He coached a baseball team, piling the children into his Volkswagen Beetle to drive them to games. When an opposing team’s coach picked a fight with one of his players and then tried to press charges, my dad stood up for the boy, winning the children’s admiration.