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I lean forward to say hello to the elderly black woman seated in front of me. Nellie Coles, who served as the county health nurse for decades, introduces herself. She asks about my family, then tells me that my great-grandmother, Epsie Vale, was a friend. Coles tells me that she knew my father when he was a boy. I tell her I’ve known Elsie since I was a child and that I’ve come to hear her sing.

I sit back, soaking up the atmosphere of this sacred place where Griffin preached, where Hill met in the basement with Barbara Johns and her classmates and agreed to take their case. For years I have wanted to hear Elsie’s voice in harmony with her church choir, to see her in her element, where she is most herself. But I can tell my presence is awkward for her. I understand, since most of our interactions over the years have been in my parents’ or grandparents’ home.

Only a couple of dozen people attend the service. Summer is a slow time, and as with many black churches around the country, the size of the congregation has dipped. But this one-room church was once the core of the county’s black community and considered by some the birthplace of the modern civil rights movement in education. While it still sits on the corner of South Main and Fourth Streets, the shopping center behind it was leveled and rebuilt. The church, off to the side of a brick mixed-use housing and retail complex geared toward Longwood students, is an artifact of an earlier time.

Sitting alone, I am anxious. I pull out my recorder and my notebook. I fiddle with my phone. Then I sit in the airy sanctuary, still, concentrating on my breath. I try to embrace the few minutes of quiet. I notice the church’s tall ceilings and gigantic brass chandeliers, the pale yellow walls and beveled glass windows. I notice the cool temperature, the air blowing over me, as soothing as a summer breeze on a hot day. And then, as the choir begins singing, I watch Elsie in front of the congregation, dressed in a white robe, swaying.

Glory, glory, hallelujah.

Since I laid my burden down.

Glory, glory, hallelujah.

Since I laid my burden down.

As the choir sings, I feel something welling up inside me. The music is so beautiful, and my life so hectic. I spend my days locked in a monotonous cycle of chores, caring for and cleaning up after small children. I don’t have the energy to do anything else, not to call friends, not to write, not to exercise. In these long days that slide into each other and blur, my thoughts rarely turn inward. I can’t remember who I used to be, who I am, except someone’s mother.

But in this sanctuary, I am free. The tightness in my neck and shoulders, even my jaw, loosens. A feeling of great sadness washes over me, and unexpected tears stream down my face. Something is missing from my life. I wonder if I am reacting to being back inside a church after years away. Maybe I need a higher power. Or am I simply touched by being in such an important place in Farmville’s history?

Then it dawns on me: this is one of the first times I have been among a group of black Farmville residents in their space. Growing up in Prince Edward, I rarely considered that other people existed beyond the community of whites I encountered at school and at church. For thirty-five years I have known only a few blacks in my hometown. I never participated in their cultural events. I didn’t have black friends, black teachers, or black neighbors.

My cheeks wet with tears, I am mourning what could have been, not just for me, but for this community.

Six miles outside Farmville, in Rice, eight-year-old Beverly Bass heard the screen door slam again and again. Black fathers and mothers from around the rural community drove up the gravel road to her family’s farmhouse and knocked on the rickety back door at all hours of the day. They came to ask her father, B. Calvin Bass, who was white, “What should we do with our children?”

Poor white parents came to the front door with their own questions. They couldn’t afford to send their children to the new private school that the white leaders were starting. How were their kids supposed to get an education?

Bass, an educated country boy who worked as a dairy farmer and a college professor, was a county school board member who had served as chairman. One of the few dissenters, he had pleaded with the board of supervisors not to close the schools. He had started speaking out in 1955, when the Defenders first proposed that the supervisors limit school funding. He had told the supervisors that a vote was premature—no black children had even applied to attend the schools that fall. Besides, the school board’s attorney had advised board members that the courts would probably allow Prince Edward to operate segregated schools for another year. They disregarded Bass.

After the supervisors voted in 1959 to close the schools, Bass set up a meeting with then attorney general Albertis S. Harrison Jr. to propose that the white school receive funds equal to the county’s regular contribution to public schools and that the state provide matching funds to keep the public schools open. His suggestion went nowhere.

AS A CHILD, BEVERLY DIDN’T know much about the contrarian stance her father took. They didn’t talk about it over supper and he never explained his position to his children. Yet she had picked up on what was happening.

When she and her mother, Beatrice, went to Farmville to shop, certain stores wouldn’t wait on them. Her mother also avoided shops on the corner of North Main Street and West Third Street, where the particularly unfriendly E. Louis Dahl, the treasurer of the Prince Edward School Foundation and a leader of the Defenders, operated his Army Goods Store. Sometimes, as they walked down the sidewalk, her mother would grab Beverly’s hand and lead her across the street to avoid white residents who called her father “nigger lover.”

Journalists had also become a regular presence in her house. They sat on the front porch, sipping tea and interviewing her dad. She knew why they were there, but unlike Skippy Griffin, whose preacher father had given him a front row seat to the civil rights movement happening in Prince Edward, Beverly wasn’t allowed to listen to her father’s conversations. When she walked onto the porch, he shooed her off. “Go away, little girl,” he told her. “We’re talking.”

Her father had grown up working side by side with blacks on the “homeplace,” as they referred to their family farm. Now B. Calvin Bass ran a dairy farm on the property, which he and his mother owned. Most white leaders in town didn’t personally know as many blacks as he did. Bass, who also worked as a chemistry professor at Hampden-Sydney College, believed they deserved an education.

“Dad was always in favor of education, period,” Beverly told me. “He did not want to see the schools closed, and that put him out of favor with the county.” He knew the agrarian era was ending, and he thought schooling would enable blacks to find other meaningful work. “The only way these kids were going to come off the farm was to be educated,” she told me.

But her father was no bleeding liberal, not by any stretch of the imagination. At his core he was conservative. “He was probably as prejudiced as the next person,” she said. He referred to blacks as “darkies.” He and her mom were shocked the first time a black person knocked on the family’s front door instead of the back. Still, the stance he took against closing the schools was unique and brave.

“He did push the limits with his thinking,” she said. “For his time, he did push it out.”

Bass also opposed the premise of the white academy, given that it was founded by many of the Defenders who had argued against him. But with the public schools closed and Hampden-Sydney College offering to foot the academy’s tuition bill for professors’ children, he had no other options for his children.

“Where else would I go?” Beverly asked me.

PRINCE EDWARD’S RESIDENTS PRIDED THEMSELVES on keeping this disagreement about integrating the schools both civil and nonviolent. As Virginians, they were horrified by what was happening farther south: slurs being yelled at children, the Ku Klux Klan burning crosses, lynchings. The death of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy from Chicago who had been attacked by two white men after he whistled at a white woman in Mississippi in August 1955, had been especially gruesome.

This wasn’t the way Southern gentlemen behaved. Virginians considered themselves different from the people who lived in the Deep South. More refined, genteel even. “They imagine themselves in the highly racialized South, yet somehow above it,” the historian and University of Richmond president Edward L. Ayers told me. “It really is a deeply ingrained identity.”

“Politics in Virginia is reserved for those who can qualify as gentlemen,” V. O. Key wrote in his 1949 book, Southern Politics. “Rabblerousing and Negro baiting capacities, which in Georgia or Mississippi would be a great political asset, simply mark a person as one not to the manner born.”

The Defenders wanted to keep segregation in place, but they didn’t need to do it by killing, maiming, and burning. They relied instead on psychological tactics and economic repercussions, such as denying blacks credit at the grocery store without explanation. Otto Overton, the Farmville police chief, wanted to make sure the town wasn’t further stained by violence, Skippy Griffin told me. He and other white leaders reached out to L. Francis Griffin, asking him to ensure that blacks did not commit acts of violence. They both agreed to work with their communities.

Those were “the terms of the struggles,” Skippy Griffin told me. “It wasn’t accidental… . It was a deliberate, conscious decision on their part.”

White leaders were proud of the display of civility. Farmville’s mayor, William F. Watkins Jr., noted the “wonderful relations” between blacks and whites. The Farmville Herald praised residents for their behavior. “It’s a credit to the people of this county,” said Robert Taylor, one of the academy’s founders. “We haven’t had so much as an argument between the races.”

Indeed, it was a blessing that no one was badly beaten or lynched, as in other Southern communities. But the lack of violence also meant that the school closures never attracted the amount of media attention that they deserved, attention that might have put pressure on the county to reopen its schools sooner.

ON A BALMY FEBRUARY DAY in 2013, I walk down Main Street, past boarded-up storefronts and into a store I frequented for years.

While I am interviewing the owner, who has known me since I was a child, a young black man in his early twenties walks in wearing a down coat. He asks to use the phone, and the owner, keeping a close eye on him, agrees after being assured the call is local. After a brief conversation, the young man hangs up and walks out of the store without another word.

When he leaves, the business owner turns to me and explains that this is precisely the reason he has considered keeping a gun. I don’t know what he means. The encounter seemed innocuous.

“Why?” I ask, and the owner explodes. “Because Farmville still has niggers!” he shouts.

A few minutes later, he acts as if it never happened, as if his behavior was perfectly normal. He tells me that he likes black people. He doesn’t need to have them over for cocktails, but he likes them.

As I began researching this book, I had hoped that the racism my hometown was known for had faded away. But I have realized that it’s still there, just not out in the open the way it was in the 1950s, when people uttered hateful slurs as they passed Bass’s wife and children on the street. Now people reveal their racist beliefs in Farmville the same way they do in towns across America: when they are comfortable, when they think they are among like-minded people, particularly when they have a glass of alcohol in hand. At a Farmville bar, a high school classmate of one of my brothers asks how he likes being around so many “niggers” in northern Virginia. The “Indian pony” comment came during a Christmas party.

On occasion, someone spews racist slurs, seemingly without provocation. I keep replaying the scene with the young black man in the store, wondering what he had done to spark such vitriol from the owner. But I come up empty.

“You Go Where Your Parents Tell You To”

On September 10, 1959, the new private school’s buses rolled down rural county roads and up Farmville’s streets, picking up white children and delivering them to makeshift schools. Nearly 1,500 white students from around the county, including my parents and uncles, would attend classes in a mix of churches, former homes, and vacant stores.

My mom, who was nine, walked up High Street, stopping in front of the handsome Farmville Women’s Club House, staring up at its elegant second-floor balcony. Four wide Grecian columns graced the circular vestibule at the entryway of the former home, painted white with a red roof and shutters.

For four years, Mom had attended the brick Farmville Elementary School on the Longwood campus. That summer, her parents had informed her that she would be switching schools, but they didn’t explain why. “You protected your children from what was going on in the world,” she told me.

Her classmate Jim Ennis, now the county’s commonwealth’s attorney, had been kept in the dark, too. Ennis, the son of a Farmville television salesman, cared about his circle of friends, what he was going to do after school, and how much homework he had to complete each night. He was oblivious to everything else, particularly the politics surrounding the school closing. “You go to school, and you go where your parents tell you to,” he explained.

In 1959, Mom didn’t know that black students had walked out of Moton High School eight years earlier, when she was a baby, and she wouldn’t learn about it for decades. Mimi and Papa had told her the court ruling was the reason she was changing schools, and she had heard Papa talking about how he disagreed with the courts forcing schools to desegregate. “My dad did not want us going to school with black children,” she said. “He was very angry at the government for making that choice.” Papa thought it should be up to him to decide if his children attended school with black children. He didn’t want the Supreme Court making that call for him.