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Dunlap lobbied the church bishop to allow Moton students to attend Kittrell so they could complete their educations. The school was already educating a handful of high school students, and Bishop Frank M. Reid agreed to expand its program to accommodate Prince Edward high school students, using the same facilities and teachers as the college. In the end, sixty-one Prince Edward students would enroll that year. Reid asked that the students pay half the tuition, but those who couldn’t afford to contribute to their education were still allowed to attend. The Prince Edward County Christian Association, chaired by Griffin, would help pay their way. The school also granted work scholarships, and some students spent the year doing the menial jobs they were trying to avoid by getting an education—answering the phone at the college’s reception desk, working in the cafeteria, and firing up the stove to heat the college president’s home.

After Griffin made the Kittrell arrangements, he announced the news to parents and students. He knew some families were already making other plans for their children, and he told them that if it was possible to send their children north to live with family members, they should pursue that path. If that wasn’t possible, “You really have no options but going to Kittrell,” Griffin told them.

Black parents who had lived or traveled outside the county, those with some means, accepted that sending their children ninety miles away was the easiest, best solution and immediately signed on. Dozens of Farmville students would be together on an intimate campus, and they’d be studying under the tutelage of college professors. Other parents had reached out to relatives who lived outside the county—and out of state—to ask if they could send their children to live with them. Children climbed aboard buses bound for Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. There they would start new schools and make new friends but endure painful separation from their parents and siblings. Some would live with relatives they barely knew. Other children would stay on the weekdays with grandparents in counties that neighbored Prince Edward, and some would even be ferried across the county line daily. The separation of children from their parents echoed the indignities of slavery and the irreparable harm done when the closest of relationships were suddenly severed.

The great majority of parents, including Elsie and her husband, took a wait-and-see approach. Many didn’t have the money, or the wherewithal, to send their children to live somewhere else. Others didn’t have relatives they could call on to help. Their children simply stayed home. Early the next year, Griffin, aided by female volunteers, would establish training centers in the basements of black churches to keep children engaged in learning by providing math and reading instruction. The centers, attended by six hundred children, were supported with donations of books and money by black sororities and fraternities and other community organizations. They were meant to build morale, and they had no curriculum by intention.

But most black children received no formal schooling while the schools were closed. The older ones spent their days working in a tobacco field instead of learning algebra. The younger ones, unable to work, simply played at home, day in and day out.

ON SEPTEMBER 6, A MOTORCADE of twenty cars bound for Kittrell College lined up outside Griffin’s church. The line stretched past the white State Theater on Main Street and around the corner at Southside Sundry on High Street. Some students were nervous because they had never been outside Prince Edward County, much less Virginia. They worried about how the college students would treat them. And they were scared to be away from their parents.

But the mood was festive as they prepared to leave for Kittrell. Ronnie Ward was giddy as he climbed into his father’s 1957 Plymouth. He and his sister Phyllistine would be among the first students to arrive at the college, and their parents were relieved to be sending them to school. As the vehicles headed out of town, with Dunlap and Griffin leading the way, the black parents drove their children toward a new life, honking their horns. A policeman yelled, “Shut up all that noise!” Students stuck their heads out of the windows, shouting at friends and waving good-bye to the community where most had lived their whole lives.

On the same day, Marie Walton, the rising Moton senior and the fifth of eleven children, left the rural Prince Edward community of Rice, an incorporated farming community six miles east of Farmville, where she lived with her mother and six younger siblings. Earlier that week, a teacher impressed with Marie had mentioned her to Dunlap, and he had dropped by to ask her mother if she could attend Kittrell. Marie, the oldest child still living at home, had just returned from New York, where she’d spent the summer waitressing while staying with an older sister. Friends had told her not to bother coming home because the schools weren’t open.

“I didn’t know what I was going to do,” Marie said. “My mother hadn’t made any decision.”

For years, Marie had performed at the top of her class. A straight-A student, she loved school, but now she was terrified of what the future held. “I’m going to be a dropout,” she worried. That was her likely path until Dunlap, a total stranger, arrived at the front door of their house. Her mother, Amanda, who had dropped out of school in the twelfth grade and now worked at the Dunnington Tobacco Company factory in downtown Farmville, agreed to let her go. “She didn’t have any other options,” Marie said. “She wanted us to go to school.”

A younger sister who stayed home would become pregnant. Another sibling would go to live with relatives in New York. The others simply stayed home.

Three days after Dunlap’s visit, Marie climbed into the car with another Rice family bound for North Carolina. “It just happened so fast,” Marie said. “You prepare for college mentally and physically. You know you’re going to leave home. We weren’t really prepared for that.”

In Kittrell, the black students found a leafy brick campus that was intimate and approachable. They registered at the school and settled into their dorm rooms. As the excitement wore off, the homesickness set in. That first night, a group of them built a bonfire in the parking lot of the administration building and sang songs, changing the words to a favorite tune. “I wanna go home,” they crooned. “I want to go right back to Farmville.”

As night fell, they sat around the bonfire, crying. “We wanted to be there to go to school,” said Marie, “but we just wanted to go home.”

THE DAY BEFORE SCHOOL WAS to start in 1959, Charlie Taylor caught a Greyhound bus back to Farmville from Atlantic City, where he’d spent the summer working. The previous spring, Charlie had told his parents he was tired of washing dishes for seventeen dollars a week at Longwood, where his father, Alonzo Hicks, was the head chef. Charlie told Hicks and his wife, Velma, a registered nurse at the one-hundred-bed Southside Community Hospital, that he wanted to work in New Jersey, where some of his friends were getting jobs. It was his first chance to get out of town.

In New Jersey, he stayed at a boarding house for six dollars a week and worked as a dishwasher at an Italian restaurant that paid three times more than any job in Prince Edward would. Plus, meals were provided.

The short, wiry eighteen-year-old called home only once the whole summer. In their brief phone conversation, Velma Hicks tried to tell Charlie about the school closures, but he wouldn’t listen. He had things he wanted to talk about. He was free for the first time, tasting life outside the South. He told her how he regularly interacted with white people. His white boss even invited Charlie to his home for dinner, and Charlie was friendly with his boss’s daughter. It was nothing like his sleepy hometown, where Charlie rarely spoke to white people.

Charlie came back to Farmville excited to begin his senior year at Moton High School. He was thrilled that he would be the editor of the school paper, the vice president of the senior class, and the cocaptain of the baseball and basketball teams. Velma Hicks had to break the news to him that the schools had closed.

His biological mother, Julia Taylor, who had a third-grade education, was a single mom, desperately poor and worn-down. She worked twelve hours a day at the Dunnington tobacco factory, shaking out tobacco leaves and hanging them to dry. His biological father wasn’t in the picture. A few years earlier, Julia Taylor had taken in her two young nieces, and she had little energy or time left over for Charlie. When, at sixteen, Charlie befriended a classmate, Jerry, and began spending all his spare time at the boy’s house, Jerry’s parents offered to adopt Charlie. His mother allowed it so that his education and living expenses would be covered.

“I went home with their son one day and never came home,” Charlie said.

Over their lifetimes, the Hicks family would take in several other children, a common practice for black families with means in the South. They gave Charlie the emotional and financial support he needed. They opened a bank account in his name and deposited a weekly allowance. Julia Taylor had missed Charlie’s all-conference and all-state basketball and baseball games for work, but the Hickses sat in the stands nearly every game.

For once, everything was going Charlie’s way. He wanted nothing more than the chance to shine in his final year of high school. “Seniors don’t want to miss their senior year,” Charlie said, “and they sure don’t want to have it somewhere else.”

When his mother told him that his friends had already left for a school in North Carolina, Charlie packed a paper grocery sack with pants and shirts. The next day, he climbed into the backseat of Dunlap’s white Oldsmobile 88. Griffin, a family friend, and Dunlap, whom he had known for years, drove Charlie to Kittrell.

He sat quietly, listening to the pair of preachers talk as the car weaved down country roads. The men didn’t think the school closures would last long, words that brought relief to Charlie. By the time they arrived in Kittrell and he set foot on the small campus, he thought of it as a temporary stop.

That night, Charlie and his friends sat on the steps of the administration building catching up on what had happened over the summer. Charlie told stories about his first encounter with openly gay people—waiters he had met working in New Jersey—and the white restaurant owner who had invited him to his home. They discussed their futures until the early morning, considering what the coming months would hold. All Charlie could think about was getting back to Moton.

For the first weeks of school, Charlie walked around in a daze. Sports were his life, and this year was supposed to be his chance to perform. College recruiters had already expressed an interest in him. But after he arrived in North Carolina, he learned that high school students weren’t eligible to participate in Kittrell’s athletic programs. He was heartbroken. “The thing that I loved the most had been taken away from me,” he said. “I was miserable. My world had come to an end.”

Angry and confused, Charlie slipped on his coat and shoes and walked a quarter mile from his dorm room down the dark, winding road to the gymnasium. This was his therapy. Whenever he felt sad or depressed, he walked back and forth on the road, praying as he pounded the pavement. He wondered if things would ever get better.

For many of the students, being away from their families was the most difficult part of their new life at Kittrell. For Charlie, who had only recently formed a strong bond with his adoptive parents, the separation was particularly challenging. The one thing that made this new life easier to accept was that so many members of his senior class were in the same boat. They were all living without their mama’s cooking, eating the bland, mushy grits served in the cafeteria. They got used to the run-down school and the chilly dorm rooms. They made do.

They had been taught not to complain, and they’d been told not to concern themselves with what they didn’t have. Instead, they focused on the reason they were in North Carolina—to continue their educations. “At least you were going to get a diploma,” Charlie said.

The faculty looked out for them, scheduling Friday afternoon tutoring sessions to help the high school students complete their assignments. Some professors even offered to work with the Moton students on weekends.

Over time, the students became each other’s families. On Saturdays, they went for walks around campus. They attended Sunday school and church together. Afterward, the boys visited the girls’ dorm for a few hours, hoping to be offered a sandwich or a piece of cake from the baskets that parents sent weekly.

They stayed busy with schoolwork and their campus jobs. Charlie was a firefighter in a girls’ dorm. He also hung around the gym during the college basketball team’s practices, and the coach asked him to serve as a trainer for the team. He made dinner and hotel reservations for away games. Before long, he was helping to run practices, subbing as a guard to run the team up and down the court. “Some of the things that I wanted and needed were coming back to me,” he said.

The Moton students kept up with news from Farmville. Once a week, Griffin would visit and update them on the progress—or lack thereof. By December, Charlie had accepted that he would not graduate from Moton. Other students poured their energy into making the year as much like high school as possible, planning a prom and putting together a yearbook. But this year away from their families would never replace the year they were supposed to have as Moton seniors.

ONE SUNDAY MORNING DURING A visit to Farmville from Boston in 2010, I ask my parents if I can leave Amaya and Selma with them for a few hours. I want to go hear Elsie sing. After breakfast, I drive downtown to the First Baptist Church, on South Main Street. It is my first visit to the historic black church. I slide into a curved pew, the wood cold on my bare legs. For years I have wanted to come, but until this trip to see my parents, I’ve never worked up the nerve to walk in.

Elsie’s reaction to me when I first arrive confirms why I had reservations. As I enter the church, I introduce myself to Elsie’s preacher and to some members of the congregation. When I see Elsie in the back of the church, I say hello and give her a hug. She seems uncomfortable, like she wants to escape. Does she dislike having me in her space, where few white people worship? Was I wrong to have come?