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Still, its legacy of racial discrimination concerns me. I worry that it will be like Farmville. What if it hasn’t changed enough or in the right ways? Richmond long buried its slave-market history, and segregation is still a profound problem. I worry about what my husband’s life will be like, if our daughters will feel any effects. I want them to have all the opportunities I had and to be accepted. And I want to protect them from the racial hostility for which the South has long been known.

As I rip the tape off a box of glassware, Jason arrives home from his new job and envelops me in a warm hug. He’s trying to adapt to this place, too, and I know it’s more difficult for him. He doesn’t have the familiarity with the city I do or the network of friends and former classmates. But he wants to make it work, too.

Jason and I imagine raising our kids with all we love about the South, minus the hardship, but we don’t know if that’s possible.

NOW THAT I LIVE AN easy drive from Farmville, I can finally, whole-heartedly, pursue the story of my hometown.

After college, I spent fifteen years reporting and writing stories for daily newspapers, large and small, from tiny Winchester, Virginia, to the capital of Oregon, from the coast of California to the heart of New England. I covered murder trials and deadly fires, legislative sessions and speeches by presidential candidates. I sat through hundreds of county meetings and studied zoning ordinances. I wrote about a neighborhood built on a toxic waste dump and the challenges Sudanese refugees face building new lives in America. Front-page news stories, business profiles, features, I have written them all. But the story of Prince Edward County is my most complicated yet. It is also the one I am most passionate about, the one I moved south to pursue. Exploring Farmville’s past, though, is agonizing. Yet the story of my hometown keeps calling me back.

For years, I have been chipping away at it, conducting interviews, researching, and writing. But now that I am closer to home, I plan to investigate Prince Edward County’s past the way I investigate corrupt politicians. I will visit dusty libraries and dig through stuffy archives. I will interview my family members and friends, leaders of the white academy, black students who had been shut out of school. I will talk with experts who spent their careers studying this little-known piece of Virginia—and American—history. I will read scores of books about Southern politicians, about the Brown v. Board of Education decision and its impact, about the civil rights movement. I will work to paint a more complete picture of what happened here, to tell the difficult truths, to make sense of what happened in my hometown.

It’s important to me to be as honest and as forthright as possible in the telling. This, of course, is taboo in the South, where uncomfortable subjects are shelved. “Virginians are allergic to the truth,” a journalist friend gently informs me, pointing out that the state’s history of slavery has never been adequately addressed.

Setting out on this journey of discovery and peeling back the layers of my town’s history will mean questioning the explanations I have been given about what happened in Prince Edward. It will require acknowledging that I come to the story from a place of privilege, in large part because of the color of my skin. I attended college financed by my parents, who also attended college, while generations of black children were denied educations, their lives and bright futures forever altered by the school closures.

It will mean moving beyond the story I grew up believing and finding my own truth. It will mean trying to answer the question always in the back of my mind: What is wrong with my hometown?

Prince Edward Joins Brown v. Board of Education

To understand the full story of the school closings, I have to go back to the beginning, to 1951. The building where it all started sits less than a mile from the house where I grew up. Before I was born, Robert Russa Moton High School had been a public black high school, named for the Prince Edward resident who had succeeded Booker T. Washington as president of the Tuskegee Institute. A historically black college founded in Alabama in 1881, Tuskegee gained fame in 1941 for creating the country’s first all-black flight squadron, the Tuskegee Airmen. The Moton school building was used as an elementary school during my childhood, yet I never learned its significance.

In 1939, Prince Edward County built this one-story brick high school with hardwood floors and giant windows on a triangular parcel of land south of downtown Farmville at the intersection of Main Street and Griffin Boulevard. The county’s first stand-alone public black high school, it was constructed for forty thousand dollars nearly seventy years after the county established a public school system. Before it opened, black elementary and high school students were educated in private schools established in homes or across the street at Mary E. Branch Elementary School, which had added high school years through eleventh grade.

At the time, schools were completely segregated. It wasn’t just lunch counters, water fountains, and city buses. Like communities across the nation, Prince Edward operated two school systems—one for white children and a clearly inferior one for black children.

Moton High School reached capacity almost immediately after it opened, in part because, in the early 1940s, the county finally offered bus service for black students. By 1950, a school that was originally constructed for 180 students was squeezing 477 into its eight classrooms. The black community was well aware of the overcrowding and had formed a parent-teacher association in the early 1940s to address it.

Elsie’s minister, the Reverend L. Francis Griffin, stepped in. Since the feisty, thirty-two-year-old minister had returned to Farmville in 1949 to help preach in his ailing father’s downtown church, he had been raising the issue of school overcrowding at school board meetings. Eventually Griffin, who also chaired the black parent-teacher association, was asked not to return. The board would let him know when it was time to build a school. But Griffin, restless and rebellious, wouldn’t be silenced easily. He organized and coordinated a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Moton’s black principal, M. Boyd Jones, also had repeatedly asked School Superintendent T. J. McIlwaine, who oversaw both the white and black schools, to address the overcrowding. The request seemed to fall on deaf ears, though McIlwaine bragged to visitors that Moton was one of only twelve black high schools in rural Virginia. Parents of black students attended the school board meetings to demand a new high school. Still, nothing happened.

The Prince Edward County School Board, consisting of only white members and appointed by the School Trustee Electoral Board, discussed building an addition to Moton High School. The state appropriated fifty thousand dollars in 1947 but the county board of supervisors would not match the allocation with local funds.

The school board’s chair, Maurice Large, didn’t think residents were ready to support the bond measure he believed would be necessary to build a high-quality school—unless they could tie it to constructing a white school or two. Large, who headed a construction firm in town, said a bond measure for “a ‘nigger’ school” would have been rejected. Finally, after years of neglect, the board of supervisors agreed in 1948 to pay up to twenty-five thousand dollars for a quick fix, funding the construction of two additional classrooms behind the school and one in front.

The new classrooms looked like chicken coops. Flimsy, wood-framed tar paper shacks that reeked of petroleum and leaked when it rained. Wind whipped through the thin plywood walls. In the winter, cracked potbelly stoves spewed hot coal. Students seated in the back of the classrooms, bundled in heavy coats, shivered and rubbed their hands together to stay warm. Those with desks next to the stoves roasted, no matter how many layers of clothing they peeled off. Children sniffled and sneezed through the winter, perpetually fighting off colds.

The overcrowding at Moton forced teachers to hold classes in the auditorium—and up on its stage—and, on sunny days, outside on the school grounds. They even led classes in parked school buses. The black high school was inadequate in other ways, too. It didn’t have a gym, a cafeteria, a science laboratory, or locker rooms. Football players had to change into their uniforms in the classrooms. Many of the black high school’s resources were hand-me-downs. Black children were picked up on dilapidated buses that had once belonged to the white schools. Since all the black students couldn’t fit on one school bus, some children routinely missed their first class while they waited for the bus to make a second run. When they were finally dropped off at school, they sat in cast-off desks, reading secondhand books that were missing pages.

Six blocks away from Moton High School, over four hundred white high school students, including my great uncles, arrived on brand-new buses to their handsome two-and-a-half-story school, originally constructed in 1912 and rebuilt after a 1936 fire. The brick colonial revival–style school was located at First Avenue and School Street, tucked into the neighborhood of stately homes on tree-lined streets. Students at Farmville High School studied from new books and enjoyed amenities such as a gymnasium with locker rooms, an infirmary, even a machine shop. Classrooms in the school’s interior overlooked an elegant, open-air courtyard in the center of the brick school.

This was what separate but equal looked like in southern Virginia in 1951. And it seemed as though nothing could be done about it. But then along came Barbara Rose Johns.

BARBARA WAS A JUNIOR AT Moton High School, quiet and reserved, but with a fiery temper. She had big brown eyes and a smile that sparkled. Born in New York City, she had spent most of her childhood in Prince Edward. When she was one, she and her family moved to her maternal grandmother’s farm in the community of Darlington Heights, sixteen miles west of Farmville, where she was expected to do chores.

Barbara later moved to the home of her paternal grandmother, and she spent her spare time roaming the woods, looking for a quiet place to curl up with a book. Her uncle, the civil rights leader Reverend Vernon Johns, taught her to play chess and encouraged her to study black history. A friend of Griffin’s, he kept an enormous library at her grandma Sally’s house, and he ordered Barbara to read the encyclopedia volumes in order, from A to Z. Sometimes, in an act of rebellion, she hid Archie comic books between the pages. But she became a voracious reader and a deep thinker, just as Johns was, burying herself in Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery and Richard Wright’s Native Son.

After her parents built a home, Barbara often retreated to the attic bedroom she shared with her sister Joan to read. When her mother took a job in Washington, DC, Barbara became a second mother to her younger siblings, preparing the family’s meals and readying her brothers for school. At Moton High School, she joined the debate team, the student council, and the chorus, and she traveled to better-furnished high schools. She was embarrassed when students visiting from other high schools laughed at Moton’s chicken shacks, snapping photographs to show friends and family at home. She began to think of Moton High School as a blemish on her community.

Barbara wondered why public officials hadn’t responded to complaints about the school’s conditions from students, parents, teachers, and the principal. She had become close to her music teacher, Inez Davenport, and mentioned how dissatisfied she was. Davenport, who was dating the principal, paused for a few moments before responding, “Why don’t you do something about it?”

“What one could do about such a situation, I had no idea,” Barbara wrote in her diary. “But I spent many days in my favorite hangout in the woods on my favorite stump contemplating it all.”

For months, she thought about her teacher’s words and about how differently black and white students were treated. “Their classes were not held in the auditorium, they were not cold … their buses weren’t overcrowded,” she wrote. Their teachers and bus drivers didn’t have to stoke the fire before classes could begin.

The turning point came one morning when Barbara ran home to grab the lunch she’d forgotten and missed the school bus. An hour later, she was still considering how she could get to school when a half-empty school bus en route to the white high school passed by and left her standing on the side of the road. She was furious. “Right then and there, I decided indeed something had to be done about this inequality,” she wrote.

She wanted to walk out of Moton and refuse to attend classes until a new school was under construction. Over several weeks, she worked quietly to assemble a team of twenty students who held positions of authority at the school and whose parents were respected in the community, students who would be willing to help her and could keep a secret. She approached John Stokes, the president of the senior class, and his twin sister, Carrie. Since his freshman year, John had said the tar paper shacks weren’t fit for animals. The cows he had milked growing up were better sheltered than the Moton students, he said.

Barbara passed John notes until he finally agreed to meet her on the football field’s bleachers to listen to her plan. She told him and Carrie that their parents’ attempts to pressure the school board to build a new school had failed. She thought a student-led strike would draw more attention to the school’s abysmal facilities. In this case, she said, “a little child shall lead them.”

John was impressed. Barbara seemed determined and driven, even fearless. He believed if anyone could pull off a strike, Barbara could. She was a natural leader, he thought, and she had a way of talking that made people listen. He and Carrie signed on to help. Barbara also recruited John Watson, a senior who served as editor of the school newspaper. For years, he and his family had been concerned about the conditions at Moton. He wanted to do anything he could to keep the students out of the tar paper shacks.

At John Stokes’s suggestion, the students named their secret plan the Manhattan Project, after the code name for the effort by the Allies to develop nuclear weapons during World War II. This was the students’ own personal war. For six months they schemed, telling no one of their plan. They swore not to mention it to their families. Barbara didn’t even tell her sister.