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Now that the schools had closed, he had six extra sets of hands. John and two of his brothers could help the family earn more money. They might even be able to get ahead. The school closures were a blessing.

John would never return to school, nor would his siblings, who would struggle with illiteracy for the rest of their lives.

PUBLIC SCHOOLS DIDN’T SEEM ANY closer to opening. Gwen Lancaster had spent the last few months helping teach at Griffin’s training centers, but Elsie and Melvin Lancaster knew it wasn’t enough for her. They had a decision to make.

When Gwen was tiny, Elsie loved to sit with her daughter on her lap. They spent all their time together, and Elsie referred to the girl as her “sweet baby doll.” By the time Gwen went to school, she could write her name and tie her shoes. Her teachers were surprised by how prepared she was. But not Elsie.

She had always known that her daughter was exceptional, and she wanted to make sure that the girl’s intellect didn’t go to waste. Gwen needed more stimulation. Elsie knew that if she kept her at home, in Prince Edward County, without access to the education she deserved, she risked history being repeated. She couldn’t bear for her daughter to be trapped working as a housekeeper or doing other menial work. Elsie always regretted not leaving Farmville as her sisters had. She wished she had done more with her life, and she didn’t want Gwen to end up like her.

“She was one of the smartest kids in her class, and she just wanted to go to school,” Elsie told me.

She and Melvin talked about what to do. It was hard for Elsie to even think about sending her only child away. She loved children and had always wanted more, but they never came. Gwen was particularly close with her father, and he hated the thought of her living away from him. “Her daddy didn’t want her to go, but I thought it was best for her,” Elsie told me.

Elsie and Melvin discussed sending Gwen to Philadelphia, where Melvin had family. They also considered moving her to Cambridge to live with Elsie’s sister. Elsie preferred to have Gwen closer, in Philadelphia. But Gwen told her parents she would rather go to Massachusetts because it was more familiar. She had spent summers with her aunt, uncle, and cousins there.

Melvin and Elsie agreed that Gwen would live with her aunt in Cambridge, a bus ticket and a world away.

When Elsie took Gwen on the daylong bus ride to Massachusetts, she was still working for my grandparents three days a week. Mimi and Papa must have known about Elsie’s trip to Cambridge, yet they never inquired how it went. They didn’t ask how Gwen was adjusting or how Elsie was coping without her. They didn’t tell her they were sorry, and they hadn’t offered to help, not since Mimi had suggested that blacks start their own private school. They acted as though they didn’t even know Gwen was gone.

“They never said a word to me about it,” Elsie told me.

Elsie kept quiet, the way black people were expected to. Life was easier for them if they knew their place. Elsie kept her sadness to herself. She hummed and sang church hymns as she ironed my grandfather’s pants and my grandmother’s dresses.

One day after school, my mother, probably ten or eleven at the time, looked up at Elsie and innocently asked her why Gwen—whom she occasionally played with—was gone. Elsie saw it as an accusation, as if sending her daughter to Massachusetts was something that Elsie had wanted. Mom didn’t know that it was a sacrifice Elsie had been forced to make for the benefit of her bright daughter.

“That was her only child,” my mom thought to herself. “How could she just send her away like that?”

When Elsie went home that night, the child’s words echoed in her head. She felt judged by my mom and her family for helping her daughter get an education, judged by a family whose children she had doted on for so many years.

For decades, Elsie held on to my mother’s words—and felt the sting of them. She could never grasp that my mom had been a child at the time, protected from what was happening in the community around her. Elsie couldn’t believe that my mom had been told little about the school closures.

All my mom knew was that Elsie had a daughter—and then she didn’t.

AFTER SPENDING THE DAY AT Mimi and Papa’s home taking care of their children instead of her own daughter, brushing my mom’s and Beverley Anne’s hair instead of Gwen’s, Elsie walked back to her nearby house. Without Gwen, her home felt empty. Melvin had given away the girl’s Hula-Hoop and sold her bike, toys that had made Elsie happy, too. Her precious child wasn’t there to cook dinner for or discuss her day. The joy was sucked out of the house. Elsie told me that she longed to hold Gwen on her lap and read to her, just as she had done when Gwen was small. She longed to tuck her in at night and tell her that she loved her. She missed her daughter terribly. She wanted her little girl back.

But with the schools still closed, she had to remind herself that it was best for Gwen to be in Cambridge. She told herself that Gwen was adapting well to her new life in Massachusetts. She would see her over the holidays and send for her in the summer. Elsie grew accustomed to the long bus ride to Boston.

Taking care of my mom and Beverley Anne was comforting, too. She was glad to be around children. Staying home after Gwen left for Massachusetts would have made her even sadder.

“I just wanted to be around kids,” she told me.

AMAYA PADS ACROSS THE WOOD floor in her patent leather ballet slippers to answer the front door, greeting guests arriving for her fifth birthday party. She is wearing a handmade dress, each tier a color of the rainbow, a satin red ribbon tied in a bow in the back.

I have invited children from all over the city to her rainbow-themed party—kids from the church preschool she attended and from the Richmond public preschool where she now goes. Her guest list is a rainbow, too.

Amaya laughs and smiles, talking with her friends as they make necklaces from Froot Loops in the kitchen and toss balloons in the living room. I serve them a brunch of waffles and fruit, then they slip old T-shirts over their party clothes and paint a giant mural in our backyard.

As the party winds down, I light candles on the six-layer rainbow cake I’ve baked and iced in buttercream frosting. I carry it to the kid-sized tables where the children are seated, and as I walk toward her at the head of the table, I take in the moment.

My little girl is growing up. She is happy and healthy, surrounded by her sister, a cousin, and her friends, among them black and multiracial children. Her classmates and their parents join Jason and me in singing “Happy Birthday.” I am glowing with pride. This moment is exactly what I envisioned for her. Romantically naive as it may be, I love it. Jason and I want to open the world to our girls. We want them to have the diverse circle of friends that I didn’t have growing up. Attending a public preschool where she is assigned to a classroom with black teachers and black students, she has made friends from a variety of racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. I am proud of Amaya, confident and beautiful on her birthday. And I am proud of what I think this party says about me: I am not defined by the history of my hometown.

When she closes her eyes to make a wish before she blows out the candles, I make one of my own: I hope that this day is just a glimpse of her future.

A handful of communities around the nation began integrating peacefully after the Brown decision was handed down. The day after the court’s ruling, President Eisenhower told Washington, DC, officials to make the city a “model” for the nation, and the superintendent for the district schools proposed a desegregation plan a week later. In September 1954, three-quarters of the schools in the nation’s capital were desegregated, and the district planned to integrate them all by 1955.

But the District of Columbia turned out to be the exception, not the rule. Across the South, defiance of Brown was widespread. Even token attempts to desegregate led to protests, riots, and violence. Under a court order, Clinton High School in Tennessee became the first high school in the South to desegregate, in August 1956. John Kasper, who recruited members for the white supremacist White Citizens Councils, arrived in Clinton to mobilize opposition to the school’s integration. On Labor Day weekend, cars were overturned and windows smashed in a riot. Tennessee’s governor, Frank G. Clement, called in the National Guard to restore order. The violence quieted down, but it didn’t end altogether. Three months later, in December, sympathetic white residents accompanied black students as they walked to school, and a preacher who served as an escort was badly beaten.

Also in 1956, a court ordered the desegregation of the New Orleans public schools by one grade per year, beginning with the first grade classes. After six-year-old Ruby Bridges passed a test and was selected to attend the white William Frantz Elementary School, her parents discussed the matter, disagreeing about whether it was a good idea, and finally decided to send her. On November 14, Ruby and her mother were picked up at home and escorted into the school by four US Marshals, two walking in front of her and two behind. As she approached the school, she passed crowds of people who shouted at her and shook their fists. She heard them scream, “Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate!”

Ruby noticed a protestor carrying a black baby doll in a coffin, and she would have nightmares about it for years. A Norman Rockwell painting depicts Ruby’s famous walk to the school.

Dressed in a starched white dress with white ribbons in her hair, she spent the day sitting in the principal’s office as white parents withdrew their children from the school in protest. For the entire school year, she was the only student in her first grade class, taught by a white teacher from Boston, Barbara Henry. She was separated from the handful of other first graders whose parents kept them in school.

It was no better in Charlotte, North Carolina. On September 4, 1957, fifteen-year-old Dorothy “Dot” Geraldine Counts integrated the city’s all-white Harding High School. Dot was greeted by white mobs that screamed racial slurs, threw trash, and spat as she walked toward the school’s front door. Photographs of the confrontation ran in newspapers across the country. Concerned for her safety after receiving threatening phone calls, her family withdrew her a week later and sent her to Philadelphia to live with a relative.

And Little Rock had also desegregated the all-white Central High School in September with assistance of federal troops called in by Eisenhower. The federal troops stayed, allowing the “Little Rock Nine” to finish the school year. But the following school year, Governor Faubus closed all of Little Rock’s high schools for a year.

Change was coming, but in the South, in particular, it was happening slowly. By 1958, Virginia was one of only seven states, including South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana, that still maintained segregated public schools. In 1961, when Eisenhower’s presidency ended, only 6 percent of black children across the country were attending integrated schools. Often only one school in a school district would desegregate, and the rest would do nothing at all. Instead, school districts waited for the issue to be brought before the courts. The burden of school desegregation fell on the shoulders of black parents.

ALTHOUGH BROWN DIDN’T HAVE THE desired effect of immediately desegregating schools across the nation, it did stoke the flames of the civil rights movement. Once segregation in schools was ruled illegal, blacks began to challenge other Jim Crow laws.

In 1955, Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, so that a white man could have her seat. After she was arrested for violating segregation laws, blacks launched the country’s first large-scale demonstration against segregation—and one of the most successful in history. The Montgomery bus boycott continued until the Supreme Court declared the bus segregation ordinance to be unconstitutional in November 1956, and, in December, ordered Montgomery to integrate its buses.

Next, sit-ins emerged as a popular and effective tool for students to force the desegregation of lunch counters and restaurants. In February 1960, four black students from the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College in Greensboro, South Carolina, sat down and ordered coffee at the lunch counter of an F. W. Woolworth Company store. A waitress at the whites-only counter refused to serve the young men, but the students stayed until the store closed. They returned days later, bringing more students with them, until blacks occupied sixty-three of the sixty-six seats at the counter. The Greensboro sit-in spawned a movement, and by the end of the month, students from Florida to Tennessee had launched sit-ins, too. Hundreds of young people were arrested on trespassing charges. In April 1960, students from around the country gathered at the campus of Shaw University in Raleigh to discuss strategy. Martin Luther King Jr. urged the students to form their own direct action organization, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was born. The sit-in movement even spread to New York. After six months of negative press and lost business, Woolworth’s decided to desegregate its lunch counters.

J. Samuel Williams, a tall and lanky young man who grew up in Farmville, was studying for the ministry at Shaw during the sit-ins and helped to found SNCC. King’s visit left a lasting impression on him. Jim Crow was the law of the land, King told the Shaw students, but the law of the land was unjust and unfair. “You don’t have to obey unjust laws,” Williams remembered King telling them.

Participating in the sit-ins reminded black Southerners that they had power. It reminded Williams of walking out of Moton High School in 1951 as a senior, “beating the streets for something you knew was right and proper.” He had served in the US Army and worked a variety of jobs in the North and the South, and he was fed up with the way black people were treated, particularly in the South.

In Prince Edward, blacks were not only required to stand at lunch counters and swim in a separate lake from whites; at the drive-in, they parked their cars on one side of the parking lot while whites parked on the other. Blacks were allowed to purchase items at Baldwin’s Department Store, but they were not permitted to try on clothes. Black mothers would trace their children’s feet on cardboard and take the cardboard cutout with them to buy shoes for their children. They were allowed to buy ice cream at some shops, but only if they entered through the back door. Restrooms and water fountains were labeled “Whites Only,” and blacks were buried in their own graveyards.