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“A lot of blacks in Prince Edward County want to put it behind them,” Mickie tells me. “They see it as hashing up old feelings.” It’s a sentiment I have heard repeatedly from whites, too.

“We’re not bringing it up out of anger,” Mickie says. “This is part of our history.”

For some, the memories are still vivid and difficult to face, even now.

BETTY JEAN WARD CAN’T BRING herself to walk back into Farmville Baptist Church, where she was arrested in 1963.

She attended Virginia State University after graduating from the Free Schools, spent thirty-two years working as a teacher, and is now retired. But try as she may, the memories of being shut out of school and being arrested on the steps of the white church don’t fade.

Sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, she accompanied her husband to his company’s Christmas dinner at Cedar Brook Restaurant, where blacks were required to order food from a window on the side of the building when she was a child. When Ward sat down at a dinner table with her husband and his coworkers, she realized that his boss, seated at an adjacent table, was one of the police officers who had arrested her on the steps of the church and dragged her out to a police car.

“I wanted so bad to let him know,” she told me. But her husband begged her not to say anything, reminding Ward that his boss was hosting the couple “here at an integrated table.” And so she did what black people were expected to do back when the schools closed. She kept her mouth shut.

She didn’t want to be put in that position again. A few years later, when the pastor of Farmville Baptist Church invited her congregation to join in a worship service, she declined to attend. “I could just picture that man standing at that door saying, ‘Y’all go back up the street where you came from, y’all got your own church,’” she said.

She happened to be out of town on the fiftieth anniversary event, but told me she wouldn’t have attended anyway. When I asked her how she feels now about what happened more than five decades ago, she became quiet.

“I’ll never forget what happened,” she told me. “I’m trying to forgive.”

ONE MORNING, LATE IN THE summer of 2013, when my girls are at preschool, Mom invites me to stop by for lunch. I walk the familiar alley from my Farmville rental home to my parents’ house. I sit down at the counter in the pale yellow kitchen, watching her slice tomatoes fresh from her garden.

She asks how a conversation with one of my former teachers at the academy went, and I unload. I’m tired of hearing the same rote lines from so many white people in town. I have encountered few who offer a fresh perspective, who admit to having grappled with the seriousness of what happened here. Instead, so many seem defensive. Mom seems defensive, too.

She has always stuck by her story. She has defended Fuqua School’s place in town, defended her father for doing what was best for his children. It disappoints me that her position hasn’t shifted, and I know she can sense my frustration.

Today, slicing tomatoes in front of me, she speaks the words I have been waiting to hear, the words that will help me to move on.

“You know, Kristen,” she says, putting down the tomato and looking at me, “we all wish it hadn’t happened. I wish it hadn’t happened.”

She cuts through the space between us with her words, acknowledging the destructiveness of the school closures, acknowledging regret. I realize that, since I started work on this project, I have been waiting for this admission. Mom says she has always been sorry the schools closed, but I needed to hear it from her. I needed her to spell it out.

With those words, she frees me.

DAYS LATER, I AM SITTING outside the French bakery downtown, drinking a cup of coffee. An enormous logging truck rumbles down Main Street.

I see Robert Taylor’s son, Bob, crossing the street, and I call out to him. He walks over and sits across from me at the café table. I explain that I interviewed his father years earlier, and I am curious how Bob, the owner of a kayak and canoe business, views the school closings.

“It’s ruined the last fifty years,” he tells me. “It’s just stigmatized Prince Edward County. Every time we try to get beyond it, something stirs it up again. Why can’t we put it behind us?”

I know what he’s thinking: he wishes I would let sleeping dogs lie. The negative publicity from the school closures has hindered Prince Edward’s progress, he tells me. He wishes it could have happened in one of the neighboring counties instead.

Talking about it, he says, is like “digging up a Johnny house”—an outhouse. “Every time you dig it up, you just make a stink,” he tells me. “Just leave it be.”

It is a common refrain. We’ve discussed this enough. While many of the people I’ve talked with are sorry the schools closed, I sense there is still a disconnect between regret about what happened and empathy for the people it happened to. I think of a story a friend shared about teaching her young son how to apologize. After he knocked over a classmate on the playground, he mumbled “Sorry” under his breath. My friend pulled her son aside and told him the apology alone wasn’t enough. He also needed to inquire about the other boy, listen to his response, and help him get up.

It’s as if Farmville didn’t get this lesson. The apologies to students shut out of school have never been adequate. Sometimes the community reminds me of a child who expects everything to return to normal once he says he is sorry. In this way, the town never grew up.

A Healing Place for the Community

In 2013, a beautifully renovated Moton Museum was unveiled. The floors of the original Moton High School had been stripped and polished. The wood trim, painted kelly green. Heavy purple curtains hung in front of the auditorium’s stage. Every detail matched the appearance of the former high school in 1951 when Barbara Johns strode across the stage and told her fellow students of her plans to strike. Moton had been transformed into a real museum—the state’s only civil rights museum.

It almost didn’t happen.

The public school system planned to stop using the building as an elementary school in June 1995. The board of supervisors announced its intention to designate the building as surplus so it could be sold and possibly demolished. Farmville High School had met that fate in 1993 after it was purchased by Longwood, and now the college had offered to buy Moton High School and the adjacent playing fields for one million dollars. The supervisors wanted to use the money to pay for an addition at the middle school and requested that the Virginia Department of Historic Resources defer consideration of the building for historical landmark status, a designation that would prevent it from being demolished.

“Some people hope that if the school gets torn down, it will make us forget what happened to us in the past,” Grace Scott Ward, a 1948 graduate of Moton, told the Washington Post.

Hugh Elliott “H. E.” Carwile Jr., then the chairman of the board of supervisors, who had served on the board since 1964, believed that “the county may be better served if the building is removed.” “People tell me it’s a constant reminder,” he told the Post, “like rubbing salt in a wound.”

Before the county announced it would no longer use Moton as a school, black residents were already working to preserve it. The Martha E. Forrester Council of Women, a branch of the National Council of Negro Women, had been trying to get historical status for the building since 1990. After learning that it might be sold, James Ghee, who attended school in Iowa during the closings and later became the town’s first black lawyer, suggested to the congregation of First Baptist Church that residents take up a collection and buy the building.

Support for the idea came from a place it was least expected. The editor of the Farmville Herald stepped in, calling for the school to be saved. “If we’re going to tear down the former R.R. Moton High School … let’s go ahead and tear down Independence Hall, too, and dump the Liberty Bell in the river,” Ken Woodley wrote in a February 1995 editorial.

A few years earlier, after his appointment as editor, Woodley wrote an editorial that supported converting Moton to a museum. When he learned that the supervisors had objected to a historic listing of the building, he took his support to a new level, angrily hammering out a response. William B. “Bill” Wall, the publisher emeritus and younger son of J. Barrye Wall, told his new editor to tone down the editorial, but Woodley refused and went home early to avoid doing so. The piece ran as he had written it.

Woodley suggested that the town should embrace Moton. “The building is a monument we should be proud of,” he wrote. “We’re not talking about a pile of bricks. We’re talking about the soul of America.”

Community support was building. Some of the older members of the Forrester Council who had been teachers rallied to secure tax-exempt status for their organization and raise funds. The Virginia General Assembly donated money, along with corporations like Wachovia and Dominion.

The supervisors agreed in 1996 to sell the school building for $306,000, including interest, to the Forrester Council, which paid the initial $100,000. The Robert Russa Moton Museum was incorporated as a separate nonprofit and took on the Forrester Council’s $206,000 debt. Historians recognized the building’s significance, adding it to the National Registry of Historic Places, and later designating it a National Historic Landmark.

The Robert Russa Moton Museum opened on April 23, 2001, the fiftieth anniversary of the school strike. For years, it was a sad space, mostly empty, rarely open, with displays mounted on faded cardboard panels. The roof and the heating system needed to be replaced, but at least the building had been saved.

WHEN LACY WARD JR. WAS named director in 2008, he believed the museum should tell a bigger story than black students being shut out of school. A black native of the county who had served in the military and lived in other states, he envisioned a museum that told the whole community’s story of the school closures, a story that would bring blacks and whites together. The museum would describe one Virginia county’s transition from segregation to integration.

Not everyone in the county embraced the vision, particularly black students whose educations had ended prematurely. “People were extremely hurt by this,” Ward acknowledged. Some black students felt the story was theirs—and theirs alone. They didn’t want the museum to recognize whites. “Why are we talking about students who attended Prince Edward Academy?” they asked Ward. Others told him flat-out, “You shouldn’t be telling those stories.” Even some members of his own board felt that way. During the renovation, Farmville’s vice mayor, Chuckie Reid, questioned the decision to incorporate stories about the white academy’s founding.

But Ward wanted to build a museum that acknowledged that race was a social construct. “Segregation was about an ill-informed view of how to look at people,” he said. “I don’t want to use that same view moving forward.”

As Ward has worked to expand the scope of the museum, the county has done little to support it. When he prepared to embark on a massive $6 million renovation and construction of six galleries in 2008, he asked the county to contribute $750,000. In other important civil rights communities, such as Atlanta, Birmingham, Memphis, Montgomery, and Selma, the local government has invested in museums. “This local government has not acted like other local governments that are at the center of national civil rights stories,” Ward told me. “They just haven’t gotten it.”

In a meeting with Wade Bartlett, the county administrator, and Howard Simpson, now the chair of the board of supervisors, Bartlett told Ward he wasn’t sure the museum was a good investment. The county declined to donate to the renovation. Bartlett explained that he didn’t think it was something county taxpayers should have to fund.

Although the county passed up the opportunity to make amends through the museum, the state has, belatedly, taken steps to repair the damage it did. The Virginia General Assembly in 2003 approved a resolution acknowledging “profound regret” over the closing of the schools. Woodley, ashamed of the Herald’s role in the school closures, believed the apologies had not gone far enough. In dozens of columns that ran in newspapers around the state, he called for the creation of a scholarship program for those denied an education. He lobbied the governor and called on state legislators to support him, finding sponsors for the legislation in the state House and the Senate. In 2004, the general assembly instituted a scholarship program to benefit students locked out of schools around the commonwealth, appropriating two million dollars, half of it donated. In the first eight years of the program, eighty-one awards of state aid were distributed to affected students to pursue job training, work toward a GED, and enroll in college classes. Woodley is encouraging the general assembly to also make the money available to the children and grandchildren of those locked out of school.

The state also built a civil rights memorial on the pristine grounds of the state capitol, steps from the governor’s mansion. The $2.8 million sculpture, located across from a statue of Harry Byrd, the leader of massive resistance, was completed in 2008 and features Barbara Johns and other students engaged in the walkout, alongside NAACP attorneys and community members. It is a beautiful tribute to the civil rights struggle in Virginia, and Prince Edward County in particular. “How do you like the new Virginia?” then-governor Timothy M. Kaine asked minutes before the statue was unveiled. “Because this is the new Virginia.”

And in 2014, Longwood University, a state-funded institution, apologized for failing to show leadership during the school closures and for causing “real and lasting offense and pain to our community” by taking black homes and a church through eminent domain. Under the leadership of President W. Taylor Reveley IV, the university announced it had established a scholarship as a way to show regret and has begun work on a partnership with the Moton Museum.

But what has the county ever done to repent?

In June 2003, the public schools hosted a Moton graduation to honor students who had been shut out of school. Many declined to attend, but the three hundred former students who wanted to participate were dressed in caps and gowns to accept their honorary degrees on the Prince Edward County High School stage. A graduation speaker, Dorothy Lockett, who had been appointed a school board member a year earlier, believed the recognition was long overdue. Her parents decided not to return to Prince Edward County when the schools reopened, and she graduated second in her Appomattox class and was awarded a full college scholarship. She came back to the county after graduating to help care for her sick father. She became the first professional black employee hired by the state employment office in town, where she would help illiterate former classmates who had never returned to school fill out applications for work.