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Redd drew up a floor plan for each of the buildings and worked to furnish them. The churches agreed to let the school use their metal folding chairs, but students needed flat surfaces to write on, so Redd put his shop skills to use. He asked Smitty Brothers Electric Company for help making desk attachments for the chairs. Working in the company’s storage room, the men bent metal conduit pipe and screwed the pieces to blocks of Masonite to create writing tablets. Then Redd organized assembly lines of volunteers to complete the daunting task of attaching legs to donated doors to make tables for classrooms. “We worked day and night,” Redd told me.

The white community was solidly behind them.

EVEN AS THE PRINCE EDWARD School Foundation’s officials worked to establish a school from scratch, they were trying to figure out exactly how to pay to operate it. They needed money for teachers’ salaries and to purchase supplies. They would have to pay for operational costs such as heating and water and basics like toilet paper and paper towels. Even with commitments from years earlier, “we didn’t know where we were going to get money,” Redd told me.

But their worries soon dissolved. Donations came in from all over the country from “people who sympathized with what we were attempting to do,” Redd said. The gifts ranged from five-dollar bills to checks for several thousand dollars. Virginia localities launched fund-raising drives, and neighboring Nottoway County raised $8,500 in a month. The academy was able to operate exclusively off donations for the first year. Still, Redd remembers gently nudging parents and local business owners to donate to the foundation. You seem to be making pretty good money, he would say to a business owner or a professional. Don’t you think you can give a little more?

The school’s administrators had reached out to textbook suppliers, who agreed to donate books. School districts around the country sent surplus materials. Even buses were donated. The United Daughters of the Confederacy ran a book drive for the academy, which needed three thousand volumes to be accredited. School officials also raided public school resources, which had essentially been abandoned. They helped themselves to whatever they needed from the locked public schools—books, desks, even goalposts for a new football field the Jaycees were building for the school. “Everything but the clocks,” Taylor told me.

Redd wouldn’t admit to this. When I asked him if what Taylor had told me was true, he smiled but wouldn’t say more.

PRINCE EDWARD ACADEMY IS ONE of a handful of private schools that opened before 1960 in the South that were formed specifically in response to threats of integration. It would be another five years before South Carolina opened its first segregation academy and the White Citizens’ Council, based in Mississippi, opened the first of a chain of schools. By 1965, thirteen private schools attended by more than 5,600 white pupils were operating in Virginia.

For a quiet farming community, Prince Edward was ahead of its time in the segregation academy movement. It threatened to be a model of defiance for other localities around the South, as New Orleans and Atlanta both considered whether to integrate or to close their schools. Roy Pearson, who led the establishment of Prince Edward Academy, visited both communities. He told New Orleans residents in 1960 that private schools were the only way to maintain segregation, and he described the benefits of a private school system to the Georgia legislature. He suggested that neither of these cities would have any more difficulty than tiny Prince Edward County in setting up a network of private schools. When delegations from other localities in the South visited Prince Edward, Pearson encouraged them to follow the same course, saying it simply took “determination.” He even wrote and published a handbook explaining how to do it.

Many Southern communities developed two school systems: an underfunded public system mostly attended by black students, and private schools set up for white children. Within a decade, these segregation academies would be an accepted part of the Southern landscape. By 1969, three hundred thousand students were enrolled in all-white schools across eleven Southern states. And twenty years after Brown, in 1974, 10 percent of the South’s white school-age children were attending private schools, only a fraction of which had been open before Brown. The region’s 3,500 academies enrolled 750,000 white children, a number that reflected a migration from public to private schools that was linked to the movement of black children into formerly all-white public schools. In Jackson, Mississippi, white enrollment in the public schools fell by twelve thousand students, from more than half of the student body in 1969 to less than a third eight years later. The proliferation of segregation academies threatened to create all-black public school systems in the rural South, particularly in counties with majority black populations.

The effect of these private schools would be felt decades later.

WHEN I CALL REDD, WHO served as the headmaster at Prince Edward Academy when I was a student, he seems to be expecting to hear from me. Even the tiniest tidbit of news zips through Farmville, and he had talked to Taylor about our interview years earlier. Redd suggests we meet at the new Central Virginia Regional Library in Farmville.

I would have recognized him anywhere. But the once portly headmaster is now a slight man in his eighties. He moves cautiously, and his breathing is labored. At home, he uses oxygen. He talks more slowly, too. But he appears happy to see me, and we embrace. I think about how he cheerfully greeted me when I climbed off the bus as a first grader.

When Redd asks about my project, I tell him that part of my motivation is learning more about my grandfather’s role in the school. I tell him that I have been studying what happened in Prince Edward County, and I am struggling with the decisions that white leaders like Papa made so many years ago.

“Don’t blame yourself,” he tells me. “They weren’t wrong. Not at that time.”

Redd explains that white leaders established the school only after careful consideration. He compares Prince Edward County’s decision to close the schools to the stance the South took leading up to the Civil War, reminding me that in 1861, leaders of Southern states thought they were doing exactly the right thing to secede from the Union. My heart sinks.

I believe the Civil War was fought over slavery, over a desire to keep blacks subservient and pay them low wages. Now Redd is connecting Prince Edward’s fight against desegregation to another Southern cause I consider immoral.

Of course, I know that many Southerners claim the Civil War wasn’t about slavery. They argue it was fought to protect states’ rights and maintain a certain, cherished way of life. But now this rationale sounds eerily similar to the reasons the Defenders gave for not wanting the schools to be desegregated. I see other parallels, too. Prince Edward’s white leaders could benefit from keeping blacks uneducated the same way they benefitted from slavery.

Redd tells me the white residents of Farmville didn’t want to be taxed for something they didn’t believe in. They took pride in their efforts to start a school from scratch. “We thought it was monumental that we were maintaining lifestyle, culture, style, so important through the South,” he tells me.

Redd is trying to make me feel better about the positions my grandfather and other white leaders staked out more than fifty years earlier. It’s easy to look back and judge actions taken by others in the past, he tells me.

Like Robert Taylor, Redd senses disapproval in my line of questioning. “Whether you like it or not,” he finally tells me, “your grandfather was a staunch supporter of PEA. He didn’t give an inch.”

The way Redd saw it—and perhaps my grandfather, too—desegregation would have happened gradually if it hadn’t been forced down people’s throats. The community would have accepted the change if it could have happened slowly, over time. “It could not happen en masse,” Redd explains. This idea was one that had been regularly espoused by the Farmville Herald as well. There was too much difference in culture and ability between white and black students to suddenly combine the public schools, Redd believes.

Redd explains that the white leaders were doing what they thought was best for the community and that the negative coverage of his beloved academy still stings. “People say, ‘Oh, look what they did down there,’” he tells me. “The reason they did is because they loved their children as your grandfather did you. We’re not bad people,” he says, locking eyes with me.

“I would do it again, probably,” he adds. He wants to make sure I know I’m not any smarter than my grandfather and the other white leaders who made the decision to found the academy a half century earlier. “They made it on the basis of what they thought at that time was in the best interest of our country and our dearest possession—our children. That was what it was all about,” he tells me. “You would have voted for it, too.”

I can’t help but wonder if what he says is true.

Black parents had no plan. For years they’d heard the threats to close the public schools, but they figured that’s all they were. Threats. No one wanted to believe that white leaders would actually refuse to provide public education. Even if white towns-people tried, surely the courts would not let them get away with it.

Parents kept their children out of the discussion in order to protect them—the same way white parents such as Mimi and Papa protected their children. The first time black students caught wind of the possibility of the schools’ closing was in May 1959, as the school year was winding down. The Moton High School girls’ basketball coach told the players to clean out their lockers, but the students paid little attention. Even after the supervisors’ historic, well-publicized vote to cut off funding, many students still had trouble believing that white leaders would let the schools close.

“When you’re seventeen, that’s not real,” said Marie Walton, who was going into the twelfth grade. “You can’t conceive of the schools not opening.” Other rising seniors felt the same. “It just didn’t seem practical,” said Bob Hamlin, a tall, shy teenager. “Why would they not want us to go to school?” “We thought they were just bluffing,” said Ronnie Ward, the quarterback of the Moton football team.

Ronnie, compact and fit, kept right on practicing football with his teammates on the field at Moton, in spite of the news. “Aw, it’s not going to close,” he and his friends told each other. “We’re going to be there another year.”

Walton went off to New York to live with a sister and spend the summer working. Bob Hamlin helped his dad at work after school let out. They figured they’d be back at their desks come September.

Ronnie’s youngest sister, Betty Jean Ward, was playing in the school yard when a white man posted a “No Trespassing” sign at Mary Branch Elementary School No. 1 on Main Street. She ran home to tell her father what the man had just done. “He told us we had to leave because schools weren’t going to open,” Betty Jean told her father.

“They’re just talking,” her dad responded. “They’re going to open.”

Even Oliver W. Hill Sr., the civil rights attorney, couldn’t accept that the schools were closed. In a meeting with black parents more than two weeks after the board of supervisors’ vote, Hill hinted that the courts might intervene. “They’re not closed yet,” he said.

While white parents spent the summer building makeshift desks to be installed in church basements, the black community took a wait-and-see approach. Black leaders didn’t strategize for the coming school year, because it wasn’t clear how long the schools would be shut. Griffin’s eldest son, Skippy, who was twelve at the time, remembers that his father thought the schools would be closed for a year, maybe two—only long enough for white leaders to make a point.

To establish backup plans for their children would send a message that the black community was accepting the status quo—segregated schools—and that was the last thing they wanted to do. They hadn’t watched their children protest the conditions of the black high school in 1951 and then sued to end school segregation to give up eight years later. They had come too far.

As the summer of 1959 wore on, it became increasingly clear that schools wouldn’t open in the fall. Griffin brainstormed how to help Moton High School’s students finish their educations. He was especially concerned about the seniors. He figured younger kids would be able to make up the lost time later, but if the older students didn’t finish in a few years, the odds of them ever graduating were slim. “They were so close,” Skippy Griffin said.

The students had been getting a solid, albeit segregated, education at the brand-new Moton High School, built after the students had filed their lawsuit against the county. The teachers were talented and they believed in their students, encouraging them not only to work toward a diploma but also to study for the sake of acquiring knowledge. The brick facility, located two miles from the old school, was such an upgrade that Betty Jean Ward’s middle school teachers at Mary Branch No. 2—the old Moton High School—teased the students by saying that when they finished middle school they would go to “heaven.”

In this period, a high school diploma was an important achievement for both whites and blacks—but particularly for blacks. It symbolized an opportunity to accomplish more, to escape the lives their parents and grandparents led, working menial jobs or sharecropping. A diploma was also money in the bank. After graduating from high school, a black teenager could get a job at a hospital, enlist in the military, and even attend college. If the Moton students didn’t graduate, their parents knew they’d all be working dead-end, minimum-wage jobs, struggling through life as maintenance workers, short-order cooks, farmers, housekeepers, or tobacco factory workers, as so many had before them.

ONCE GRIFFIN ACCEPTED THAT THE schools wouldn’t open in the fall, he walked across Main Street to see the Reverend Alexander Isaiah “AI” Dunlap at Beulah African Methodist Episcopal Church. Dunlap suggested sending some of the high school students to the historically black Kittrell College, which the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) ran in Kittrell, North Carolina, outside Henderson and some twenty miles from the Virginia line. Dunlap taught several days a week at the college, which was founded in 1886 by the North Carolina Conference of the AME and was struggling financially.