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Sandra “Sandy” Stokes, followed by Everett Berryman, Jr. and Emerson Hunt, protests the closing of Prince Edward County schools. (Photo courtesy VCU Libraries)
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Police arrest protesters outside College Shoppe on Main Street in Farmville on July 27, 1963. (Photo courtesy VCU Libraries)
I don’t like going home. Not anymore.
Last year I published a book, “Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County,” which described white leaders’ decision to close the county’s public schools in 1959 rather than desegregate. I believed the story of their stubborn prejudice and of black residents’ suffering — and resilience — was important.
But people I had known since childhood didn’t like what I’d done. I was pulling off a scab that had never been allowed to heal. Family members felt betrayed by my portrayal of my grandfather, a founding member of a Farmville group that called for the school closures.
Many residents embraced my telling of the community’s complex history and its role in the civil rights movement. But others stopped speaking to my parents and me. Relatives turned away. Some people couldn’t admit that closing the public schools and opening a private academy for white children had been wrong.
I am proud of the book. But each time I drive to Farmville, I face a familiar feeling that I don’t belong.
In high school, I couldn’t wait to leave behind small-town life. I was planning my departure for college by ninth grade, papering my bedroom walls with university posters and planning college tours. Once enrolled at the University of Mary Washington, I avoided going back to Farmville for extended stays, taking a job as a camp counselor in North Carolina for one summer and working as an intern in Washington, D.C., during another. After graduation, I moved to the West Coast to take a job as a newspaper reporter. I had long known that I was meant to explore the world beyond Virginia.
After 13 years, two things brought me back: the desire to tell the story of my hometown and to raise my two young daughters closer to their grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.
Months after my book was published, Longwood University announced that it had landed the vice presidential debate, and I saw great potential for sharing the county’s history in prime time. National media, for the most part, had failed to show up when the school doors were chained and locked in 1959.
But this time, I believed the media would report the full story: the Moton High School walkout orchestrated by Barbara Johns; the county’s role as one of five cases in what became Brown v. Board of Education; and the school closures that stalled or ended the education of 1,700 black children — and some whites — for five years. The closures were a shameful act of bigotry.
When reporters began to arrive for the October debate between Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine and Indiana Republican Mike Pence, I worried that they might miss the important story yet again. Longwood press materials focused more attention on Johns’ walkout than on the school closings. I had pitched the story to dozens of media outlets, with little response. As the cameras rolled in Farmville, early reports in a variety of media omitted the school closures.
On the morning of the debate, I went to the Robert Russa Moton Museum, where I was handed a map for a brand-new Farmville Civil Rights Walking Tour, featuring many of the historic sites I had written about in my book. At the civil rights museum, housed in the former all-black Moton High School, some of the students who had been shut out of school a half century ago were on hand to tell this difficult history, while others participated in the tour.
Farmville Civil Rights Walking Tour (Photo by Kristen Green)
As the tour began, I initially felt disappointed. Most people in attendance were locals. Where was the media? A block away, the media center on the Longwood campus was teeming with countless reporters.
But as the group made its way down Main Street to black churches that had supported the Moton walkout and had held classes for black children during the school closures, I focused instead on those around me, moved by history. I had underestimated how important it was to many residents of Farmville for their town to have a positive moment in the spotlight, to be recognized for something more than its terrible history. Holding this tour, on this important day, was an act of repentance.
While I was working on the book, I realized that I could not separate myself from Farmville: I am my hometown, for better or worse. I also realized that my grandfather could be the kind, loving Papa I knew and also help found a private school that excluded black children.
Watching my hometown prepare for the vice presidential debate proved to me that I need to acknowledge that Farmville can be two things at once: a place with a tragic past and a vibrant, modern town trying to craft a new identity.
I’m not ready to let Prince Edward County off the hook for closing its schools or for failing to invest adequately in public education today. But it’s time for me to work to forgive the community for its mistakes, as I have forgiven my grandfather for his, and as I hope people will forgive me for mine.
Maybe that will make going home easier.
