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In recent years, enrollment has plunged to fewer than four hundred students, down from seven hundred when the academy integrated in 1986. The recent economic downturn hit rural counties particularly hard, and the public school population has dropped, too. Two-thirds of the Fuqua student body travels from outside Prince Edward, and the school sends buses to pick up children who live as far as sixty miles away. Tuition for middle and high school students has climbed to $7,800 per year—a fraction of the $20,000 starting price for elite Richmond-area private schools. But Fuqua’s tuition is still steep in Prince Edward, where the median household income is $36,700 and parents work as professionals, small business owners, and farmers.

Parents I talked with, including former classmates at the academy, told me that they believe the education their children are getting at Fuqua will better prepare them for college than a public school education would. They like that the school offers honors and advanced placement classes, that class sizes are small, that Fuqua utilizes multiaged classrooms so students can learn at their own pace, that there is a focus on technology. Others said that their children are happy in the intimate setting. They appreciate the honor code and the requirement that students perform community service to graduate. Most of all, they are drawn to the feeling that the school is “a family.”

Murphy told me that she has worked diligently from the moment she arrived to make Fuqua an open environment. With the board’s approval, she discounted tuition for students of color. “Diversity strengthens a school community and should be embraced,” the school website reads. The school’s mission and beliefs were developed by a committee made of teachers, parents, and alumni. “My goal has been to welcome people of every nationality and race,” Murphy said. “We have done that.”

Despite her best efforts, it has been difficult to attract black students. In the 2013–2014 school year, about 5 percent of the student body was black. She believes many blacks in the community can’t afford the tuition, even at the reduced rate. The bigger impediment, she told me, is that the black community “refuses to acknowledge what we’ve done.” Black residents still refer to Fuqua as a racist school, as do white liberals, she said.

Murphy insists it’s not true. As she tells the parents of black children who apply: “We want more black kids. We value diversity. We want you to tell people that Fuqua welcomes minority kids and values them.”

Murphy asked the board in 2008 to approve a pair of full four-year scholarships for black students, with the goal of making Fuqua’s successful black students more visible. She wanted the recipients to act as ambassadors for the school in Prince Edward’s black community. Since it was approved, the scholarship program, funded with private donations, has been modified to assist not only black students but also any economically disadvantaged student. In 2013–2014, ten students—some black, some white—received a combination of partial and full scholarships. Most were athletes.

In 2013, the school had its first valedictorian of color, an Asian student. In 2014, a second Asian student was the valedictorian.

Murphy doesn’t know what more she can do to persuade the community—and black residents in particular—that Fuqua School is not the same place it once was. By adopting a textbook that addresses the school closures, she has ensured that Fuqua’s students are taught the county’s past in fourth and fifth grade history classes. In 2014, high school students marched in a reenactment of Barbara Johns’s walkout, an event Murphy attended. Fuqua classes visit the Moton Museum, and Murphy has served on its board of directors since 1999. When a fellow board member asked her how she dealt with her school’s history, she reminded him that it was just that—history. “That’s what makes where the school is now a miracle,” Murphy says.

For a school to make a decision to completely change its heritage—to go from being a school established specifically for white children to a school accepting of and open to diversity—is a dramatic change, she says. “It is not the same place,” she tells me. “It is not the same school.”

But even with a new name, the school will continue to be a vivid symbol of racism for some.

PERHAPS MURPHY’S DRIVE TO DIVERSIFY the school has had unintended consequences. By recruiting black students, she has lured away some of Prince Edward County High School’s best athletes, infuriating some black residents.

In 2008, Murphy met with Charles Williams, a freshman and the starting quarterback on the public school’s football team. Charles wanted more opportunities than he saw at Prince Edward County High School, and one of his best friends had transferred to Fuqua. Murphy offered Charles a full scholarship on the condition that he would promote Fuqua, telling other blacks what he liked about the school.

His mother urged him to transfer. Within a week, he had decided that Fuqua was best for his future, in part, because he liked that the school felt like a family. “I didn’t … worry about the history,” said Charles, a college sophomore. “I was looking at Fuqua today.”

But some of Charles’s fans on the football field, even a close family friend, told him they’d never watch another of his games if he transferred. When he made the switch, some of the county school’s boosters were livid. They believed Fuqua was cherry-picking the public school’s best athletes, “the future of the football team,” Charles recalled. They viewed Fuqua School as being more interested in a strong athletic program than true integration.

Charles made history as Fuqua’s first black team captain and was regarded as one of the best—if not the best—athletes in the school’s history. After Charles came to Fuqua, it was easier for the school to attract black athletes from around the region. By the 2012–2013 school year, the basketball team had seven black players. A year earlier, the school had brought in its first black administrator, Marcus Gregory, a former assistant coach at Prince Edward County High School. Gregory now coaches Fuqua’s varsity basketball team and serves as its athletic director. He is the only black faculty member—the only faculty member of color, period—though the school does have black staff.

Ricky Brown, the former basketball star at Prince Edward County High School, is angered by Fuqua’s recruitment of black students. He doesn’t believe that the school is a different place. If Fuqua really wanted to diversify its student body, he told me, it would not recruit black athletes. Instead, the school would focus on black academic stars, or even nonathletes who are struggling academically and need help to succeed.

Brown refuses to set foot on the campus, even when the public school’s basketball team, coached by his brother-in-law, James Scott, played Fuqua for the first time during its regular basketball season in 2012–2013. In back-to-back games, Prince Edward County won on its home court. A week later, when the public school lost at Fuqua, Brown wasn’t there.

Doug Vaughan, the retired prison warden, can’t get past Fuqua’s history either. “I never liked Prince Edward Academy,” he told me. Just hearing its name bothers him. “The academy was built solely to keep the races from mixing,” he told me, “and I felt that was just wrong.”

Its founders didn’t care whether he got an education or not, Vaughan says. When he received an invitation to a retirement party for one of his fellow corrections officers at Fuqua, Vaughan considered not attending. His wife, JoAnn, called him out. “Are you going to let a building stop you?” she asked him.

He relented and went to the party, but it didn’t change his feelings. The school has a different name, and black students now attend classes and play sports, but, to Vaughan, it is still the same school that was founded to keep black kids out.

Those children who lost years of their education will never be able to trust that Fuqua is a different place. And who can blame them?

TWENTY-TWO YEARS AFTER I GRADUATED from Prince Edward Academy, I return to my high school senior English classroom. The fluorescent lights are identical. The painted cinder block walls are the same. It is still an unattractive brick school with a leaky roof and modest facilities, not the sanctuary some have imagined it to be.

Senior English is still taught in the small classroom where I remember taking classes with Daphne Mason, my funny, Shakespeare-loving next-door neighbor. The new teacher, Diane Stubbins, is also funny and engaging, but in a different way. She allows the students to talk quietly, which creates a dull hum while she lectures. Students can leave to go to the bathroom, and they can roll Matchbox cars back and forth on a table to help them stay focused during the ninety-minute class. She talks about sex in their study of Shakespeare. She is quirky and cool, and I am surprised when she tells me that she sends her own daughters to the county’s public schools. That would have been unimaginable when I was a student here. Stubbins represents a certain openness that didn’t exist when I was growing up: you were either an academy person or a public school person.

Students are required to wear uniforms, but despite this change, the school seems more permissive and creative than when I attended. The library, once a staid, musty place, now is a vibrant space where students eat lunch and socialize with their friends.

The school feels decidedly more diverse. As enrollment fell in recent years, Murphy reached out to teachers and staff for ideas to bring in more students—and more income. She followed the lead of other private schools in Virginia and launched a foreign exchange program to lure international students eager to study in the United States and willing to pay higher tuition—students who would come for three or four years with the intention of attending an American college. A faculty member trained to teach English as a second language, and in 2013–2014, six students from China and one from Japan enrolled in the new program.

It is the ultimate paradox. The school founded to avoid desegregation, a school that for decades snubbed the black children born and raised in this county, is now welcoming brown students from halfway around the world.

THE SUCCESSFUL INTEGRATION OF THE Prince Edward schools is owed, in large part, to James M. Anderson Jr., who, like my grandparents, grew up in Buckingham County. As the principal of Buckingham’s high school, he had been demoted to an administrative job when, in 1969, he refused to replace the school’s black valedictorian with a white one, as his superintendent had suggested.

He accepted the job as superintendent of Prince Edward County Public Schools in 1972 at the urging of an academy official who told Anderson he wanted to see the taxpayers’ money spent well. The county’s spending on schools had remained low since they reopened, but the state had established a minimum threshold for localities to spend on schools, requiring the county to increase its allocation to schools by nearly 50 percent.

But a challenge facing the public schools was a new, publicly funded laboratory school on the Longwood campus that was drawing children away from the public system. Two hundred students, most of them children of Longwood and Hampden-Sydney professors, were attending the Campus School. Established in 1970, the school went only through the seventh grade, so it wasn’t a perfect solution for parents who didn’t want to send their children to the public schools. Anderson encouraged the presidents of Longwood and Hampden-Sydney to send their own children to the public schools, and a group of professors also agreed to enroll their children, dampening other white families’ fears that they would be ostracized if they moved their children to the public schools. The campus school closed in 1982.

Over the twenty-five years Anderson served as superintendent, his policies encouraged integration, and the number of white children enrolled in the public schools gradually increased. Performance improved, as did the graduation rate, and the high school began sending students to esteemed universities and boasting National Merit Scholars.

A Newsday reporter, visiting the community prior to the fortieth anniversary of the Brown decision in 1994, found that, of the five localities in the suit, Prince Edward was the “success story.” It had truly integrated its schools. Summerton High School in Clarendon County, South Carolina, had one white student. The state of Delaware was trying to bring an end to the busing that had enabled it to successfully desegregate its schools. Linda Brown, the girl whose surname was the namesake of the Supreme Court decision, spent years in federal court, fighting to get schools desegregated for her own children and grandchildren in Kansas. The Washington, DC, schools were overwhelmingly black and poor. Next to them, Prince Edward County was a star.

By 2009, the picture had changed. Student performance fell after Anderson retired in 1997. As superintendents circulated through, teachers left for jobs in neighboring counties, and money from the state dropped off. The graduation rate hovered at 67 percent, and academic performance on state assessments in core subjects did not meet state or federal standards.

Prince Edward County High School scored in the bottom 5 percent of schools in the state when the Obama administration announced in 2009 that the US Department of Education would distribute eight billion dollars to improve student achievement in the country’s lowest-performing schools. The Virginia Department of Education wanted to enroll Prince Edward County High School in the federally funded turnaround program to boost student performance. The school district would get $500,000 per year for three years to raise test scores, close achievement gaps, and boost the graduation rate. The funds could be used to hire an education consulting company to help make the improvements and put instructional aides in every classroom to improve teaching.

Before the district could get started, a new principal needed to be hired.

DRESSED IN A SHARP TAN suit, Craig Reed greets me inside the high school’s lobby. The morning bell has just rung and the hallway is still buzzing with students. Parents sit on benches, waiting to talk with school administrators, and tardy students sign in at the front desk. Reed leads me into the administrative suite, and we sit down at a table in a conference room where he has laid out neat stacks of papers detailing students’ progress.