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Mimi and Papa prepared Mom for the change by telling her that she would be able to walk to her new school and that she’d be with her classmates from Farmville Elementary. They made the transition seem ordinary. She didn’t know that black children like Elsie’s daughter, Gwen, didn’t have a school to attend. She didn’t know that the schools for black students were closed and that parents were sending their children to live with relatives in other counties, even other states. She had never had black classmates. She had never played with any black children other than Gwen. All she knew was that she was going to a pretty new school.

“We had no idea what a big deal it really was to the black community,” Mom told me.

JUST OUTSIDE TOWN, BEHIND THE county fairgrounds off Route 460, my father, Chuck Green, along with two of his younger brothers, Steve and Mike, waited at the end of their gravel driveway for a bus to pick them up and take them to their new schools.

The bus dropped Dad at the Farmville Moose Lodge, a bare hall with wooden floors. He didn’t like this school, which smelled of stale beer and cigarettes. His seventh-grade class was separated from other classrooms with a simple partition, and he could hear everything being said next door. There was no playground, so at recess he and his friends tossed a ball next to the building.

The previous year, my dad, Steve, and Mike, who ranged in age from eight to twelve, had attended Farmville Elementary School. They had just moved to the county with their strict grandmother, who lived in an old farmhouse her father had built on twenty-three acres. Epsie Vale, who had brought up eleven children of her own, was now raising her four young grandsons. Their father, a chief warrant officer for the navy, died of leukemia when my dad was nine, and Granny Vale stepped in to care for the boys when their mother’s alcoholism progressed. Within a year of taking them in, Granny Vale would sit the boys down on her bed and deliver the news that their mother had died.

After briefly staying with relatives near Richmond, where she had been working, Granny Vale returned with the boys to Prince Edward, to the house on Fairgrounds Road. Vale, a religious woman who was twice widowed, spent hours each day praying and reading the Bible, and she required the boys do the same. They lived a meager existence, surviving off their father’s military pension and money from her grown children. When I asked my dad how his grandmother managed to pay the academy’s tuition, he wasn’t sure. It’s possible they were given scholarships.

Granny Vale collected and distributed clothes and food to families in even greater need. The back porch was piled high with donations that she would sort and deliver to both black and white families living in country shacks. The Bible told her to take care of those in need. It also told her that blacks and whites should be segregated, and she found scripture passages to support her reasoning. When she fed a needy black man who worked on her farm, he ate on the back porch. But a little black boy was invited to sit at her kitchen table.

“She loved black people,” my dad told me. “She just thought she was better.”

Granny Vale believed black people deserved respect and care. She forbade the boys from speaking negatively about them. She particularly disliked disparaging terms like “nigger,” which many white kids in the rural community used freely. My dad and his brothers wouldn’t have dreamed of uttering the slur. “She thought that was extremely demeaning,” my uncle Steve told me. “As far as she was concerned, everybody had a soul.”

When the white academy was formed, she didn’t object to her grandchildren attending a segregated school. It was the only option. She accepted the status quo, my dad told me, but she never condemned black residents for wanting to integrate the schools. Instead, she told her grandsons that she often thought about their children.

“It’s terrible,” she said, “that the black kids don’t have anywhere to go to school.”

THE ELEGANT EXTERIOR OF THE women’s club where my mom attended school announced to the community that white children had everything they needed. In truth, the clubhouse was packed uncomfortably full. A pair of front parlors had been converted into classrooms. Students could barely walk through the rooms, where thirty desks were crammed.

My mom quickly learned that if she needed to use the bathroom, she should go before class began. After school, students would remove the desks and the chalkboard to prepare the parlors for the club’s afternoon tea. The fourth graders studied from hand-me-down books with torn backs and unraveled bindings. There weren’t enough books for every student, so they had to share. And teachers couldn’t assign homework, because they didn’t want to risk losing the few books they had. Recess was different, too. The clubhouse had a tiny yard compared with the playgrounds the students were accustomed to. Whenever the students played kickball or baseball, they had to run down the hill to retrieve the ball from the thick bamboo that rimmed the property on the banks of Buffalo Creek. It took time to get used to the tiny classrooms, but for the most part, school was school and my mom and her classmates adapted to the new setting.

Mom’s teacher that year, Elizabeth Crute Goode, was one of the best of her life. When Mom had trouble with an assignment, her teacher spent extra time working with her. When Goode noticed my mom squinting at the blackboard, she told Mimi. Mom came back to school with glasses, and a whole new world opened up to her. She could finally see the blackboard. One night, she walked outside and saw stars for the first time.

Mom’s favorite thing about her new school was being allowed to walk home, even though her new black-and-white saddle shoes dug blisters into her heels on the half-mile journey. The best part of her day was stopping at the neighborhood grocery, Butcher’s Store, on the corner of Griffin Boulevard and High Street. It was the same grocery store that Griffin’s son Skippy had dropped by with his friends after school. The black children stood in a corner, where George Fred Butcher would bring them a selection of candy and sodas. After they’d paid for the treats, they were expected to leave. On days when the store was busy, Butcher dismissed Skippy and his friends with a simple, “Not now, come back later.” Skippy understood the rules of segregation, and even as a young boy, he recognized that he should adhere to customs. It was just the way things were.

When Mom walked inside Butcher’s store to buy a five-cent bottle of Coca-Cola, she sat down at a little table inside the store, feeling the cold sweetness trickle down her throat, the tiny bubbles making everything brighter.

THE STORE OWNER’S DAUGHTER-IN-LAW, REBECCA Butcher, taught at the academy from the day it opened.

She had graduated from Longwood, married Buck Butcher, and taught home economics for three years at Worsham Elementary, the handsome two-story brick school with indoor plumbing and heat where Robert Redd and J. Boyd Bagby had also worked. The school was located six miles outside Farmville in the community of Worsham, which had served as Prince Edward’s county seat until 1872. Butcher took pride in her classroom’s neat, homey appearance. She decorated the bulletin boards, collected books, and hung posters to create an inviting space for students to learn. She relished teaching in such an organized setting.

When the schools closed, she lost all the teaching materials she’d spent years collecting. Academy administrators may have accessed public school supplies, but anything teachers had personally bought was locked inside the school. One morning, a county official opened the school doors for teachers to retrieve their belongings, and Butcher took a punch set that the home economics teachers had pooled their money to buy, but nothing else.

Like the vast majority of white teachers who worked for the public school system, Butcher transitioned to working for the private school foundation. A tiny, birdlike woman, she hopped around from makeshift school to makeshift school, working as a long-term substitute until she was hired as a full-time teacher. There was nothing fancy about any of the academy’s borrowed facilities. Teachers in the new private school system felt that their struggles were overlooked.

“We suffered, too,” Butcher told me. “And let me tell you how we suffered.”

On opening day, she taught class aboard a yellow school bus parked outside Worsham Baptist Church. The school foundation was building an addition at the church for more classroom space, but it had not yet been completed. The conditions on the bus that opening day weren’t so different from the ones the Moton students had protested in 1951, but white parents were willing for their children to endure these second-rate facilities for the sake of an all-white education.

The buildings varied by location, but they had much in common: There were no lunchrooms—students either ate in the classroom or left early enough to eat lunch at home. There were no playgrounds. In eighth grade, my father broke his wrist at recess running backward in a paved parking lot across the street from Farmville Baptist Church.

The academy couldn’t offer art or music classes. Even basic classroom supplies were limited. Butcher scavenged her house for newspapers, sheets of cardboard inside her husband’s new dress shirts, and brown paper grocery bags—anything she could find that the kids could use for drawing and painting. “It was a lot of making do,” she said.

Because there were so few textbooks and no mimeograph machines, Butcher wrote worksheets by hand for each of her thirty students. She read test questions aloud and required students to write their answers on sheets of blank paper. Butcher grew accustomed to the lack of resources and the makeshift classrooms. Still, she dreaded dismantling and reassembling the room every week. On Friday afternoons, she took down the bulletin board decorations, then folded the metal chairs and put them away. When Monday morning rolled around, she set up the entire classroom again.

She was depressed by the surroundings, which included a Ping-Pong table and paper bags spilling donated clothing. She spent her second year teaching in the damp, unfinished basement of the Moose Lodge, and she had to tilt her head back and glance up at a row of tiny windows to glimpse any natural light. This classroom—if you could call it that—was nothing like that which she had envisioned as an idealistic college student considering a career in education. “It was such a mess,” she said.

In the Moose Lodge’s basement, the temperature never rose above 65 degrees, and Butcher stayed uncomfortably cold, even in a full-length wool pleated skirt paired with thick tights. She sat on her knees while she taught, keeping her legs warm underneath her.

That year, a paper-thin partition separated Butcher’s class from Agnes Watkins’s. Sometimes Watkins called out math answers while Butcher was testing her students. Having one bathroom was also a challenge. She lined up the girls to use the restroom, and then the boys got a chance. When the kids were thirsty, she sent a pair of boys upstairs to fill a bucket in the Moose Lodge’s kitchen, and then she used a dipper to fill water cups her students made from sheets of paper. Eventually Butcher grew accustomed to teaching in these basic conditions, but she never liked it.

“We did our best teaching those years,” Butcher told me, “because we couldn’t do anything else but teach.”

Butcher called what she and the academy students endured in those years “suffering.” But I kept thinking about Shirley Davidson, a black six-year-old, who each day got dressed and pretended she was going to school, too, skipping down the hill from her home to the bus stop. I kept thinking about all the children who would never reenter a classroom.

Wasn’t that the real suffering?

ONE OF THE TOUGHEST CHOICES parents make is deciding where to send their children to school. Now that it’s time for Jason and me to think about it, I’m grateful we have options: How much should we shelter our girls, and how much should we expose them to? Can we strike a balance? Is that even possible?

We are considering whether to move Amaya, who is four, from her tiny church school to a public preschool center in a neighborhood near ours. I am touring the dated one-story brick building, constructed in the 1950s and badly in need of a makeover, yet bursting with life. Walking the hallways, I admire the children’s paintings adorning the walls. I peek into classrooms with neatly arranged cubicles, where four-and five-year-olds are happily playing in learning centers, cooking meals in miniature kitchens, and sitting at desks writing their names.

Some parents aren’t sure about sending their children to a preschool that is 80 percent black with children from tougher neighborhoods. But I like the idea of our girls in classrooms that are more reflective of our majority-black city with its growing Latino and Asian populations. I want to ensure that, from a young age, my children have a different experience than I did, learning with teachers and classmates of different races, who come from different socioeconomic backgrounds, who speak languages other than English. I want them to understand that not everyone’s life looks exactly like theirs, to understand that our differences make life infinitely more interesting. Jason and I believe public school will expose our daughters to more diversity and more humanity than most private school educations.

We also believe vibrant public schools are essential to create thriving communities and that all children should have access to good, free education, as Jason did growing up in Texas. We know how important it is for parents to invest in neighborhood schools, and we want to be engaged in improving the schools our daughters attend.

But there’s a catch. Richmond is a failing school district. Test scores and graduation rates are low. Students who manage to get a diploma often don’t go to college. The city’s high poverty rate is partly to blame, as is student truancy. And the schools in the region are increasingly segregated by income as well as race. In Richmond, most schools are overwhelmingly black, which, in this city, translates to poor. Seventy-seven percent of students qualify for free and reduced lunches, and there are many barriers to their academic success, from not having enough to eat to not having a parent at home encouraging them to do homework.