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“This should not have happened to you,” she told the locked-out students.

Five years later, on the day the state civil rights statue was unveiled, the county illuminated a Light of Reconciliation. The idea had been proposed by Woodley, who was disgusted that “the county had never expressed its sorrow for the school closings, it had never done anything to honor Barbara Johns or those students for the birth of the civil rights movement.” The supervisors embraced his suggestion, lighting the bell tower at the same county building where the decision not to fund the schools had been made.

The board of supervisors publicly denounced its predecessors’ decision not to fund the county’s schools, honoring Johns and her fellow students who had participated in the walkout. The board also had a plaque installed in front of the courthouse acknowledging that closing the schools was “wrong” and stating that they “regret those past actions.”

“I think they felt that that was it,” Joy Cabarrus Speakes, one of the litigants in the Davis suit and a museum council officer, told me. She didn’t think it was enough. “You can’t just put a plaque out and then nobody talk to each other. You have to come together as a community.”

The question is, can anything ever be enough?

IF ANYWHERE CAN SERVE AS a healing place for this community, it is the Moton Museum.

For years, staff have worked to pull together black and white residents and to make the museum a place of unity where the whole community can gather to learn its shared history. Moton hosts events on anniversaries of important court decisions, the kneelin, and the walkout. It hosts weekly brown bag lunches, a free monthly community prayer breakfast, and an annual community benefit dinner. It is also becoming a place where people can tell their stories, where they can work to forgive, where they can be forgiven.

For a long time, Everett Berryman, now a preacher in Lynchburg, didn’t like to talk about what happened to him when the schools closed. His parents moved with their children to Appomattox, where they lived in the homes of two families before returning to Prince Edward and enrolling their children in the Free Schools. Everett never saw himself as a victim. Instead, he viewed the school closings as a wake-up call. If he wanted an education, he had to go out and get it himself. He has been successful in spite of being shut out of school, but he was ashamed to go to the museum and talk about how well things turned out for him around people who had fared worse and were still hurting.

But in July 2013, during the anniversary of the sit-ins, Everett returned to the museum to share his story, and I wanted to hear it. Tall and sturdy, Everett sat in front of a series of round tables in the auditorium where white and black residents of the county were gathered. My mom had joined me, and we were seated at a table with Mickie Pride. My aunt, Beverley Anne, and her youngest daughter sat at a table behind us.

Everett explained why, for a long time, he didn’t like to talk about the school closings. He felt he had benefited because he had gotten opportunities he might not otherwise have had, opportunities other children in the community didn’t get. He had survivor’s guilt.

The audience members, including my mom, peppered him with questions. Pride, who lost four years of school during the closures, showed empathy. Petite with curly hair, Mickie told him that she was dealing with strong emotions of her own. The hate had been brewing for years, starting when she was shut out of school and building up when she was in her twenties.

By the time she had children, it had taken root in her heart. She worried she would pass this anger on to her kids. When one of her children came home from school and complained about an interaction with a teacher, she would get defensive and ask: Was she white or black? Any conflict always came down to race.

For her, the museum has been a place of healing. It began at a Moton reunion, when a former student’s sermon made her think more deeply about the weight of the anger she was carrying around. Then it progressed to the museum, where she and Rebecca Butcher, the longtime teacher and administrator at Prince Edward Academy, were interviewed for a radio program. Mickie came into the museum feeling defensive, her shoulders tight, dreading the conversation. But during the interview, she heard something she hadn’t heard before. Things were not perfect for white children and their teachers at the private academy. It was a difficult time for them, too. For the first time in her life, Mickie listened to a white person and gave her a chance. But Mickie also made a point to be heard. When Butcher talked about the difficulties of working at the white academy, Mickie responded that she would have loved to have attended school.

When the interview was over, the two women hugged. Now Mickie comes back to the museum every week to learn more about the past. She speaks in front of large audiences about her experiences. She has opened her heart, a little at a time, and she has begun to heal. And that healing has benefitted her children, too.

“I wasted some forty-seven years being angry,” she told Everett and the audience. “I can’t take it back. All I can do is move forward, and I’m not too old to do that.”

THE MUSEUM IS A PLACE of connection for me, too. Jason and I visited on one of our first trips to Farmville from San Diego, and a new world opened up. Then, as I began work on the book, I conducted interviews in the auditorium, and as the museum began offering regular programming, I attended its events. I watched as Moton was transformed from a dingy relic to a shining monument.

The museum is where I meet former students affected by the school closures, who participated in the walkout, who were arrested at the kneelin. Moton provides a safe space where I can ask about their experiences in an environment where they feel comfortable, even excited, to share their stories. It is also a place where I can talk about the role my family played in the town’s history, about attending the white school, about knowing only one black person growing up. I can tell people that I have been researching my grandfather’s role in the Defenders and in the white academy, and that I am grappling with the realization that he was an early supporter of massive resistance. I can be honest about my family’s history, and, most of the time, I feel acceptance, not judgment.

The more I tell my story, the more black people I encounter who knew Papa or knew his name. They offer to absolve me of the guilt and shame I feel about his decision to embrace massive resistance and join the Defenders. At a celebration of the museum’s reopening, Lacy Ward Jr.’s wife tells me Papa’s role was typical. When I mention it to Henry Marsh, the Virginia Senator who worked for years as a civil rights attorney with Oliver Hill Sr., he reassures me that in the 1950s “most of the respectable white people were Defenders.” Goodwin Douglas, who led the student protests, says my grandfather agreed to see patients of the town’s black dentist at Southside Community Hospital because blacks were not permitted to practice at the time. He suggests that my grandfather might not have held on to the beliefs that led him to join the anti-integration organization. “A lot of the people who were Defenders changed as things went along,” Douglas tells me.

Elsie’s daughter, Gwen, declined to talk with me. Perhaps she holds my family accountable for what happened to her. I don’t blame her. But many of Elsie’s other relatives are open and friendly. At a Moton High School reunion at the county’s Twin Lakes State Park, once run as two separate state parks segregated by race, I introduce myself to someone I recognize from Elsie’s church. He tells me he is Elsie’s nephew and introduces me to his brothers. One nephew who lives in Richmond wants to introduce me to his grandkids. He asks me to pose for a picture with him so he can show Elsie. At the dinner banquet that night, her nephews are kind, politely answering my questions and telling me about their lives.

Sometimes I wish I could follow the lead of my mother, who doesn’t seem particularly troubled by my discovery that her father was a Defender. The way she views it, Papa’s membership fit with his belief system at the time. He grew up on a farm, and, other than military service overseas and a handful of vacations, all he knew was Southside Virginia—isolated, rural, agricultural, conservative. Papa and Mimi embraced the beliefs common among whites in southern Virginia at the time, Mom has told me. Blacks were inferior, and race mixing was bad. It was a belief passed down from our own founding fathers, Virginians like Thomas Jefferson.

But then I think about this American president, who expressed a fear of miscegenation throughout his life, while fathering mixed-race children with Sally Hemings, one of his slaves. The hypocrisy reminds me of Farmville’s leaders, who bragged about the lack of violence in Prince Edward while exacting a severe punishment on all black children and their families, and then continued to blame blacks for seeking equal facilities, and later, desegregated schools.

In Farmville of the 1950s, whites who were courageous enough to call for keeping the schools open—or for reopening them once they were closed—faced enormous personal and professional repercussions, such as being humiliated, harassed, even run out of town. Neighbors jeered and grocery store clerks turned their backs on Farmville High School principal James Bash after the meeting in Jarman Hall, and he quit two months later. James R. Kennedy, the preacher at the Farmville Presbyterian Church, resigned under pressure in 1956 after his son was harassed. Gordon Moss, the Longwood dean, was removed from his leadership position in the Episcopal church after letting black students sit on his pew. Lester Andrews put his construction business in jeopardy and friends stopped speaking to him. If Papa hadn’t supported the academy, he could have lost his dental practice.

I consider what to think of people’s offers to absolve my grandfather. In my research, I haven’t turned up information about the root of my grandfather’s objection to desegregation. He is not quoted in newspaper articles or books, and he left behind no journals. Beyond his Defender membership and his role at the private school, I don’t know exactly what he believed or why he believed it, and it’s unlikely I ever will. Sunny Pairet, sitting at his store downtown, tells me that my grandfather “kept his thoughts to himself.” I wonder: Did Papa feel pressured to go along with other white leaders who were fighting desegregation? Or was his silence, as is so often the case, a powerful form of consent?

We tend to view racism as extraordinary, as the exception. But at the time the schools closed, it was part of the fabric of American life, particularly in the South. It would be easy to absolve Papa, to say he was doing the same as other white leaders, but if no one will take the blame for the schools’ closing, even on behalf of their family members, it becomes, as the historian David W. Blight writes, “a blameless act.” “Responsibility for history can be generalized and spread around so diffusely that no person or people are ever deemed the source of radical evil,” he suggests.

Yet people are responsible for what happened in my hometown. People like my grandfather.

I’M TIRED OF BEING DISAPPOINTED with Mimi and Papa. I’m done questioning my parents’ decision to return to Farmville and send me to the academy. I want to come to terms with my upbringing—and to accept that I can never leave Prince Edward County behind. It’s part of my identity. My family tree extends back generations in Southside Virginia. Just as Fuqua School can’t erase its history, neither can I.

I am the segregation academy. I am the grandchild of prejudiced but loving grandparents. I am the sister of a Fuqua School teacher and the sister-in-law of a Prince Edward County High School teacher. I am the mother of multiracial children, the wife of a multiracial man. This quaint, damaged community is my hometown. I cannot be separated from any of it—not from Farmville, not from the white academy, not from Mimi and Papa.

Although I sometimes wonder how I would have turned out if I had attended a different school or grown up in a different community, I never wish for a different family. My parents and brothers are my world. I adored my grandparents, and their love made me the person I am today.

Still, I can’t help wishing that Papa had been braver, that he had been willing to challenge the system. Surely he knew people who had risked their businesses to take a stand against the school closings. If only he had considered the impact of his actions on his devoted housekeeper and her daughter, and on black children around the county who would be forever damaged by his stance.

I want to find comfort in the words of blacks who generously let me off the hook. But, deep down, I wonder if it’s important to not just recognize, but grapple with, the shame and guilt I feel. Perhaps it should be my legacy to regularly confront these strong emotions about what happened in Prince Edward and the role my family played.

And yet I realize that holding on to these feelings isn’t progress. Progress is revisiting what happened here in a public way, connecting with both black and white residents and telling their stories. My contribution is to share the whole story, the complete story, of this town.

The McDonald’s on Main Street, across from Longwood University, buzzes with activity every morning. Cars stretch around the drive-through window and fill the diagonal parking spaces on both sides of the building. Inside, the flat-screen televisions are tuned to Fox News.

A group of older white men, along with a pair of women, sit on the right side of the restaurant around a long, rectangular table, drinking coffee and chatting. Black men and a handful of ladies sit on the other side of the restaurant doing the same thing. The franchise owner makes his way around the room, talking with the regulars and pouring free refills. The two sides of the fast-food restaurant occasionally interact—a white former town police officer walks through and says hello to black acquaintances—but, for the most part, they sit separately, segregated once more.

One summer morning I grab a seat on the left side, where half a dozen black men are talking and laughing, including a tall, heavyset man who tells me his family moved to New Jersey after the schools closed. He had returned to Farmville seven years earlier.