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Blacks were repeatedly told that this was the way it was supposed to be. Some began to believe they were suited to work only as maids, chauffeurs, or barbers. “After a while,” Williams told me, “you get that stuff inside of you.”

The progress achieved through sit-ins across the South made Williams excited to carry Raleigh’s activism to Prince Edward. The schools were still closed a decade after he had joined Barbara Johns’s protest of the conditions at Moton school. But when he came home from Shaw on the weekends to preach with Griffin, he felt as though there was nothing he could do to help. He believed Prince Edward’s problems were in the hands of the court. In 1961, a group of black parents had filed the case Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County in federal court as an amended complaint to the Davis case, seeking for the schools to be reopened, and it was working its way through the judicial system.

In 1962, after Williams had graduated from Shaw and started preaching at Levi Baptist Church in the small Prince Edward community of Green Bay, he began serving as the president of the county’s Voters Registration League. In his new position, he traveled around the county, encouraging black residents to register to vote so that they could elect blacks to local leadership positions and change the makeup of local government bodies. He realized that many blacks in the county were more determined to bring change than he had originally believed.

Finally, in the spring of 1963, it was time for action in Prince Edward, as students became inspired by boycotts of businesses and other demonstrations that King was leading. In May, Birmingham’s police commissioner, Bull Connor, released dogs on protestors and sprayed a group of adults and young people with high-powered hoses, awakening the nation to the violence happening in the name of segregation. Eisenhower’s successor, President John F. Kennedy, had sent three thousand federal troops near Birmingham and was preparing to federalize the National Guard. Birmingham’s business leaders saw how the negative publicity was damaging their town and agreed to desegregate lunch counters, to allow blacks to try on clothes in department stores, to hire more blacks, and to remove “Whites Only” signs from drinking fountains and bathrooms. The action in Birmingham had spun off hundreds of “Little Birminghams” across the US, resulting in twenty thousand arrests.

The country was becoming increasingly disgusted by Prince Edward, which was making national headlines for its still-closed schools. Dr. Robert L. Green and a team of researchers from Michigan State University, funded by the US Office of Education, came to town, attempting to determine how black schoolchildren had been affected. They would soon learn that the illiteracy rate of black students ages five to twenty-two had jumped from 3 percent when the schools had closed to a staggering 23 percent. They found seven-year-old children who couldn’t hold a pencil or make an X. Some didn’t know how old they were; others couldn’t communicate.

Immediately after the schools closed, nonprofits began arriving to offer assistance. The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker organization, established an office with the goal of helping black residents get the schools reopened. AFSC staff worked with Griffin to provide libraries in church basements and also organized a year-round youth recreation program, staffed by volunteers who drove in from Richmond. At the national level, the AFSC put out a call to its chapters, asking for volunteers to take in students so they could attend school. The organization placed forty-seven students in volunteers’ homes in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, Iowa, Michigan, and Washington, DC, for the 1960–1961 school year. The next year, AFSC expanded the program, sending students to Berea College’s Foundation School in Kentucky, and a Farmville leader borrowed a funeral home’s station wagon to drive six students across the mountains.

During the three years the program was offered, sixty-seven students stayed in homes scattered around eight states. Eighteen of the students completed high school, and several went to college after graduation, including Phyllistine Ward, who left Kittrell to spend her senior year living with a white family in Iowa. James Ghee also went to Iowa, where he lived with several different families while attending high school and would stay for college, too.

Now, in 1963, more than three dozen New Yorkers, students from Queens College and city teachers, partly financed by the American Federation of Teachers, were arriving to offer summer enrichment programs. Some of the teachers were white, and they lived with black families and swam in the black lake. They avoided going to white restaurants, eating in the homes of black families instead.

Eighty miles away on the North Carolina border, things were heating up in Danville, Virginia, where Dunlap, the AME preacher who had helped to place students in Kittrell, now lived. In March 1963, King had visited Danville and met with the leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. With his encouragement, Dunlap and other black ministers—men who were fed up with the segregation of everything from water fountains to hospitals—led a series of demonstrations. Assistance streamed in from volunteers in New York, including SNCC leaders who would later head to Farmville. Danville’s white leaders ignored the protests, and local newspapers did not cover them. Arrests mounted. Then, on June 10, city garbage collectors, who had been deputized by the police chief, aimed fire hoses on full blast at demonstrators attending an evening prayer vigil. King would later describe the attack, which came to be known as “Bloody Monday,” as among the most brutal of the civil rights movement. All but three of the fifty demonstrators were injured.

J. Samuel Williams, now a preacher, suggested to Griffin it was time to demonstrate in Farmville. Griffin had threatened white leaders with boycotts in 1959 and 1960, and in 1962 he had persuaded teens not to demonstrate. Williams was tired of waiting. “You felt guilty if you weren’t doing anything and living in an environment of rampant segregation,” said Williams, then twenty-nine.

The Reverend Goodwin Douglas, the new twenty-five-year-old preacher at Beulah African Methodist Episcopal Church on Main Street who had attended school with many Farmville students at Kittrell, also thought demonstrations were needed. After he went to a lunch counter in Farmville and saw employees break the glass from which he had drunk, he begged Griffin to let him organize marches.

Griffin, elected statewide leader of the NAACP in 1962, recognized that the young people were inspired by Birmingham and similar demonstrations. Some of them attended integrated schools out of state—a few even lived with white families—and they saw the possibilities beyond this little town. “The hardened attitude and techniques in Birmingham certainly has served to arouse a great many lethargic and complacent Negroes to action in Virginia and elsewhere,” he told the Richmond Times-Dispatch. In late June, he called a meeting of the Virginia State Conference of the NAACP and implemented a new plan that would support selective buying campaigns—boycotting businesses that supported or tolerated segregation.

With the new focus on direct action, Griffin worked to revive youth councils across the state and gave approval to Douglas and Williams to work with young people in Farmville. The goals were two-fold: they wanted to integrate the segregated facilities downtown and open the school doors for locked-out black children. The campaign would eventually include sit-ins at restaurants, “kneelins” or “prayins” at white churches, demonstrations at local government buildings, and a boycott of Farmville stores that didn’t employ blacks.

National media saw the demonstrations as evidence that blacks were finally willing to stand up to the county’s white leaders. “In the sweltering heat of Virginia’s Prince Edward County,” Time magazine wrote, “Negroes woke from long torpor … to demonstrate against the most infamous segregationist tactic in the US—the closing of public schools there since 1959.”

FIRST, THE YOUNG PEOPLE NEEDED to be trained in nonviolent demonstration tactics.

A pair of SNCC officers led the two-week training. Betty Jean Ward, who had lived with her grandparents for four years in neighboring Nottoway County, wanted to participate. She drove her dad’s new ’57 Plymouth to and from Vernon Johns’s farm for the training sessions, piling in a bunch of her friends.

On the farm, the trainers taught Betty Jean and the other teenagers how to protect themselves if the police intervened during the demonstrations. If officers approach you, the trainers told them, drop down and don’t move. If they are wielding water hoses, curl into a ball to protect your face. If they have dogs, grab something to shield yourself. After the training, the students practiced the new tactics, getting into each other’s faces and shouting “Nigger!” The trainers doused them with ketchup and mustard. They were being prepared for the hatred they might encounter on the picket line.

One July night after the training, the students decided they wanted to start demonstrating right then. “Let’s see if the College Shoppe on the corner is open,” one of them suggested. Blacks were allowed to enter the College Shoppe and make purchases, but then they were expected to leave. On this night, a dozen young people walked through the front doors and sat down at the counter.

“What are y’all doing?” a white man behind the counter asked them. “Get out of here. I’m going to call the cops.”

When the police arrived, they talked with Douglas, who had accompanied the students, and then called Griffin, who rushed to the store. “We’ll leave tonight, but we’ll be back in the morning,” Griffin informed the manager. The next day, Griffin told the students he would support them as long as they followed the law.

Everett Berryman, the fifteen-year-old who had been attending school in Appomattox County for two years, borrowed his father’s ’55 Chevrolet each day and trucked seven students from Prospect and other far western reaches of the county into Farmville to demonstrate. One day, Williams sent Everett and several others into J. J. Newberry’s, a five and dime store chain, which had a long counter—maybe fifteen to twenty seats—and instructed them to sit down.

Everett was served a cup of coffee filled with salt. He and the others left after twenty minutes. When they came back the next day, the stools were gone.

“They took their stools up and never put them back,” Betty Jean remembered.

The students demonstrated in front of other businesses that didn’t employ blacks. By late July, they had become a permanent fixture downtown, carrying signs that read, “I Have Lost Four Years of ‘Education.’ WHY FIVE?” and “While the 4th Circuit Court Continues to Wait, Education for Negro Children Suffocates.” The young people gathered every morning at First Baptist Church, where Williams assigned them each a location for the day. The demonstrators broke at lunchtime, often gathering on Williams’s front lawn, where he and his wife served hot dogs and hamburgers. After the students ate, many of them returned downtown to demonstrate.

The young people walked up and down both sides of Main Street, carrying placards with slogans like “Let’s Make Jim Crow Look Like a Rainbow” and “We’d Rather Line Up for School.” A boycott of Farmville businesses was also under way.

In the mornings, teenager Sammie Womack would protest in front of Pairet’s Discount House, where he was employed. Then, later in the day, Sammie put down his sign and went inside to work his shift. Sunny Pairet, the white owner, called him out. “How the devil you think I’m going to pay you to work when you walk back and forth in front of my store with a sign that says don’t shop in Farmville?” Pairet asked Sammie.

“Mr. Pairet, I’ve got to do it,” Sammie responded. Pairet, who that summer was running for a seat on the supervisors and calling for the schools to be reopened, allowed the teenager to continue working for him.

White students from the north, including some who had volunteered in Danville, joined Prince Edward’s demonstrations. Some told Williams they were glad to serve food or paint posters, but they didn’t want to be on the picket line because whites had been injured in demonstrations in other towns. Other students who admitted that if they got hit, they’d hit back were given other assignments. The strike’s leaders didn’t want the demonstration to turn violent because they knew it would bring negative attention, distracting from the mission. The goal of those demonstrating was to be placid.

“You could have smacked most of us down and we would have gotten up and said thank you,” said Tina Land, the president of the NAACP Youth Council.

Only one grocery store and one drugstore were exempted from the boycott, so black residents drove to Lynchburg or Richmond to buy items they couldn’t find at those stores. A truck driver confided to the students demonstrating in front of one of the targeted grocery stores that he was delivering a fraction of the normal supplies. The campaign seemed to have gotten the attention of white leaders.

“They knew by then that people were not playing,” Douglas said. “Kids were tired. They wanted to see the schools reopened.”

Then came a turning point. On July 27, a Saturday, black protestors paraded through town, requiring Main Street to be cordoned off and traffic detoured. A small group of protestors walked to the College Shoppe. When they refused to move, ten people were arrested. The next day the teenagers staged prayins or kneelins at white churches around town in an attempt to integrate them. The black students organized a rally of four hundred people at Griffin’s First Baptist Church and then dispersed to white churches around town. A group of black students went to Farmville Methodist Church, where they were turned away at the door. When young people entered the Wesleyan Methodist Church, the entire congregation got up and left except for five people and the brand-new minister, who was preaching for the first time. He begged the students to leave, and they complied. At Johns Memorial Episcopal Church, ushers planned to seat black students in the front of the church to embarrass them, but Gordon Moss, now the dean of Longwood, invited the seven students and an adult to sit in his pew. The next day, he would be dismissed from his position as the church’s treasurer.