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Taylor thought Fuqua might be willing to contribute to Prince Edward Academy, too, and he called him to ask for help in 1991. Fuqua, who said he “never gave a penny” to the school while it was all-white, offered to pay off the one-million-dollar debt if the school would raise one million dollars in matching funds.

Redd wrote a ten-page letter outlining the full extent of the school’s financial problems and what it needed. In 1993, Fuqua announced he would give the school ten million dollars and that it would be renamed for him. He said he hoped his gesture would “close the door” on the county’s history of racial division. He stipulated that the school be open to children of all races and religions and that it focus on becoming a model school that utilized best practices. For years, he had been embarrassed to be associated with a community that had closed its schools and denied black children an education. “I wanted to wipe out the stigma of that horrible school closing,” Fuqua said, adding that he thought it had held back the whole community.

Perhaps he believed that changing the school’s name, as well as its black and orange colors and Wolverine mascot, remnants of the white Farmville High School, would enable the town to forget the school’s racist history and the reason it was founded. Perhaps he thought that the changes he ordered would be enough for the town—the nation even—to think of it as an altogether different school.

With the money Fuqua provided, the academy installed air conditioning, added a cafeteria and a gym at the elementary school, raised the teachers’ salaries, and purchased hundreds of computers. Fuqua installed a new headmaster, and he and his wife took seats on the board and visited Farmville annually. The school, he said, would be “changed in its entirety.”

A few days after his announcement, seniors at the former Prince Edward Academy began the new academic year by driving to the renamed school in a motorcade, passing through an arch of balloons in the school’s new colors, red and gold. Students pinned red and yellow flowers to their shirts, and many teachers wore Fuqua School T-shirts. The school reported that it had enrolled twenty-eight students of color, twenty of whom were black.

The academy, Fuqua said, “disappeared.” It was the dawn of a new era.

But was it?

IT’S LATE JULY 2013, AND it’s hot. Southern hot. Muggy, sticky, uncomfortable. I’m over summer, and I’m over this town.

I’m still living in Farmville, doing research. It’s not so much the small-town vibe that’s driving me crazy or even how little there is to do. I welcome the slower pace of life. It’s more the white men glaring at me while I interview a black man in a restaurant. It’s the way some whites, even people I’ve known since I was a child, seem wary and suspicious when I approach them, especially if I try to talk about the town’s history. Even my parents want to avoid discussing what happened here so many years ago. They barely ask about my research. My mom, in particular, gives the same tired defenses, and I’m left wondering if we’ll ever move beyond them.

Walking the streets, I notice a tension hangs in the heavy summer air. People seem angry. Sometimes I feel as if this whole town is still protecting a secret.

I thought coming back to Farmville as an adult, with children of my own, would allow me to see more clearly the town as it is today, maybe even let me make peace with its past. For the sake of research, I moved here for the summer with the girls, renting a brick two-story house up the street from my parents.

So many years have passed since I left for college, but in my day-today life with my children in Farmville, not much has changed. Here I am, living in my parents’ neighborhood, floating in their pool. After I pick up my daughters from day care, we sometimes head to the public library or grab a milkshake. But usually the girls ask to go swimming in their grandparents’ pool. We stop at our rental house, where they slip on bathing suits, and then close the front door behind us, cross High Street, and skip down a tree-lined gravel alley to my parents’ home.

This summer is eerily similar to summers past. All these years after community leaders closed the public schools here, I still exist in Farmville in a mostly white world. My parents’ neighborhood—the one in which I am living—is almost entirely white. The bakery is frequented by white customers. Even town-sponsored music events attract a white crowd.

Over lunch with a white Longwood professor, Heather Edwards, I ask her if this is how her life looks, too, and she seems surprised by the question. She has a diverse set of friends, as do both her children. She can’t even imagine a segregated life in Farmville, and she assures me that if I lived here full-time and sent my kids to public schools, as she does, it would be different. Her son plays with black children on youth sports teams, and her daughter takes dance classes with black children. Edwards’s life in Farmville sounds similar to mine back in Richmond, but it’s hard for me to imagine that scenario for myself here. My hometown still seems so stuck in the past, unable to redefine itself.

Of course, there has been much progress since I left more than two decades ago. The community has diversified, like Virginia as a whole. At Walmart, I notice mixed-race children, Muslim women shopping in burkas, and Hispanics. The newspaper that once called for the schools to be closed in the name of segregation has helped promote healing. And there are more ways than ever for residents to interact. Whites and blacks run on treadmills next to each other at the new YMCA. They check their e-mail side-by-side on computers at the new community library. They swim together at Farmville’s community pool, which the town purchased from a private country club. All these places give blacks and whites a chance to strike up conversations, get to know each other, and find commonality, even if their kids don’t go to the same schools. Blacks serve on the board of supervisors and the school board, and hold other elected offices. Still, the progress seems limited, the racial divide deep. Many people don’t reach outside their established lives.

Even important turning points seem to veer off track. In 2005, when Congressman John Lewis and Senator George Allen visited the county as part of a three-day “Reconciliation Pilgrimage,” demonstrators waved Confederate flags, expressed displeasure that segregation had ended, and referred to Allen as a “turncoat.”

Three years later, the all-male Hampden-Sydney College hired its first black president, Chris Howard, a Rhodes Scholar and graduate of Harvard Business School. The decision by the college’s board made national news, evidence of how far the community had come. Howard, the great-great-grandson of a slave, grew the number of students of color. But four years into his presidency, on the night of President Barack Obama’s reelection, forty students shouted racial slurs, threw bottles, and set off fireworks outside the Minority Student Union. The “harmful, senseless episode” made national news. One student would be expelled and three more placed on probation and ordered to perform community service. The event became not only a stain on Howard’s presidency and the college, but yet another on the county.

The social constructs in place in Farmville, for someone who attended Prince Edward Academy and was raised in a white neighborhood with only white friends, mean my life here looks much the same as it did growing up. Yet it is different in one significant way: I now know dozens of black residents. I spend Mondays in the town’s civil rights museum, the Robert Russa Moton Museum, learning about the community’s history, and afterward I sometimes go out for lunch with a mixed group. During the week, I interview black residents about their experiences during the school closures. I regularly visit with Elsie and feel comfortable attending her church. I bump into J. Samuel Williams at the library, and we embrace. I take my daughters to the museum and introduce them to its leaders, and I invite my parents and other family members to join me at Moton events. Personally, it’s a huge change.

But I want more.

Prince Edward County Public Schools look entirely different than they did forty years ago. Whites now make up 36 percent of the student body, not 6 percent. Black students account for 57 percent, not 94 percent. And a growing percentage of students—about 7 percent—are some other ethnicity or mixed race.

Still, black students are disproportionately represented, comprising the majority of the student body but only one-third of the county’s population. Lacy Ward Jr., the director of the Moton Museum, believes that this racial makeup is why county leaders do not allocate the public school system the money it needs to prosper. “They still see the system as the black system, so they fund it as such,” Ward said.

The board’s chair, Howard F. Simpson, elected by a coin toss after a split vote, acknowledged as much to me, and he gets upset talking about how this county has historically treated its black residents. Yet in the last five years, the only increases in local school funding went to teachers’ salaries, health insurance subsidies, contributions to the state’s retirement fund, and a reading specialist’s salary. During that time, average daily attendance plunged and the school district’s overall budget dropped by $3.5 million, or 12 percent.

The supervisors don’t seem to hear concerned parents, who have asked them to raise taxes to support education. Simpson and other members have refused, even though the county’s tax rate has historically been among the lowest in the region. The supervisors also ignored a five-year proposed capital improvement plan laid out by the school board to fix leaky roofs, replace a failing heating system, and renovate a rutted football field. As the problems become critical, the school board is forced to go back to the supervisors for emergency funds. Yet more than a million dollars of the county’s money was spent constructing a road to an undeveloped site of a hotel that may never be built.

In 2014, when the school board requested nearly one million additional dollars in local funds to pay for kindergarten aides, a preschool teacher, and a replacement bus, a new member of the board of supervisors questioned why the county’s per pupil spending was higher than surrounding counties. Supervisor C. R. “Bob” Timmons Jr. was seemingly unable to understand how the county’s poverty rate and history of denying blacks an education has affected its population. “But that was 50 years ago,” he protested.

A school board member told Timmons if he compared Prince Edward’s per pupil spending with other localities, he also needed to consider student needs in those counties. After the discussion, Farmville Herald editor Ken Woodley called for a study of the school closures’ generational effects. Twenty-four years earlier, the paper had named him the first non–family member editor. The former editor, Bid Wall, a grandson of J. Barrye Wall, had left the position for a new career, and the direction of the paper was left to Woodley, a young reporter who had joined the staff out of Hampden-Sydney College without knowing the county’s—or the paper’s—history. Woodley would become an advocate for the many residents impacted by the school closings, though no members of the Wall family have apologized on behalf of the newspaper.

“For too long this subject has been the giant elephant in the room that nobody talked about when school funding and academic programs are discussed,” Woodley wrote. He told readers that he has long believed the school closures have affected generations of Prince Edward residents. “It’s common sense,” he wrote. “Children raised in homes where parents cannot read, for example, are going to be impacted by their parents’ illiteracy.” In fact, 16 percent of county residents were estimated to be illiterate in 2003, the latest numbers available. The county’s illiteracy rate is 4 percentage points higher than the state’s.

Woodley envisions a document elected officials could turn to each time they make decisions about how to spend the county’s money. But it was too late for the 2014–2015 school year. The board voted to raise taxes by 5 percentage points, but not a penny of the new funds would go to the schools.

RUTH S. MURPHY SPENT THE first part of her career as an educator trying to desegregate public schools in North Carolina. But when she arrived in Farmville in 1994, handpicked by J. B. Fuqua to lead the private school, she did not grasp how difficult the job would be.

Fuqua School, still a predominantly white, independent school, sits on a sixty-acre campus at the top of a hill above downtown Farmville. Six one-story brick buildings, each with six classrooms, make up the upper school. The classroom doors open onto sidewalks and manicured lawns lined with wood benches and dogwood trees. The cafeteria and administration building is located across the street from the school, and behind it a huge pool buzzes with activity all summer long.

When Fuqua took over, Robert Redd was pushed out after serving as headmaster for decades. Another leader was put in place briefly, but Murphy essentially took the reins from the man who had designed and built the school, in some cases with his own hands. Brash and determined, Murphy viewed herself as an agent of change. The way she saw it, there was a lot about Fuqua School that needed changing. Instead of having teachers stand in front of classes lecturing, she wanted them to use hands-on learning. She wanted to fashion a board that operated independently and wouldn’t fold to parents’ every whim. She needed to develop a curriculum and write new school policies. And she wanted to create a learning environment that embraced diversity.

After she had been in Farmville a few years and learned more about the history of the school’s founding, she realized that overcoming its racist past would take more time than she had thought.

The school she has invested two decades rebuilding might never outrun its legacy.

OVER THE YEARS, MANY OF the segregation academies scattered across the South have shut down. In Virginia, one merged with another private school, while others simply closed their doors. But some of those that started around the same time as Fuqua School remain, despite dwindling student bodies. When Redd was questioned in the early years about Prince Edward Academy’s viability, he told reporters the school would be around for decades, and he was right.