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After meeting with doctors, I opt for surgery and radiation. I change my schedule to spend more time with my daughters, now three and five, and fewer hours working as I recover and heal. But these minor alterations to my routine are not enough. I view my family and my future differently now. Nothing is guaranteed. I need to reprioritize so that I can do the work I value most and also pick the girls up from school.

After I finish my treatment, I walk into my boss’s cubicle at the newspaper and tell her I am resigning. I am free, empowered even, to pursue this story that has nagged at me for so long.

BLACK ADULTS WEPT WITH JOY when the Brown decision was handed down, telling their children it was a great and important day. The Washington Post optimistically announced that the verdict was “a new birth of freedom” for black Americans. White leadership in the stunned South reacted with absolute outrage.

How dare the federal government tell the states that blacks and whites had to attend schools together? How dare it exert that kind of authority?

On the floor of Congress, Representative John Bell Williams, a Democrat from Mississippi, branded the day “Black Monday.” In South Carolina, the distraught governor, James F. Byrnes, said that “ending segregation would mark the beginning of the end of civilization in the South as we have known it.” Georgia’s governor, Herman Talmadge, said that the decision had reduced the Constitution to “a mere scrap of paper” and announced that “there will never be mixed schools while I am governor.” His successor, Marvin Griffin, referred to the decision as a “bitter pill of tyranny,” and said “the South will not swallow it.” In Mississippi, US senator James Eastland announced, “The South will not abide by or obey this legislative decision.”

Virginia joined in, and ultimately led this pushback. “The greatest resistance to Brown anywhere occurred in Virginia,” Henry L. Marsh told me.

The most powerful politician in Virginia, US senator Harry Flood Byrd Sr., the son of a wealthy apple grower and newspaper publisher, considered the Brown ruling to be an unconstitutional infringement on states’ rights, calling it “the most serious blow.”

When the ruling was first handed down in May 1954, Virginia’s governor, Thomas B. Stanley, announced hours later that he would go along with the decision, which he said warranted “cool heads, calm study, and sound judgment.” He promised to consult with leaders of both races to pursue a policy “acceptable to our citizens and in keeping with the edict of the court.” But he would not follow the course he suggested.

In response to his calls for moderation, “the top blew off the US Capitol,” Stanley later said. Byrd, a former governor himself who had a firm hold on Stanley, warned that the Brown decision would bring “dangers of the greatest consequence.” What kind of dangers, he didn’t say. Byrd’s regime, which controlled Virginia politics, would use its influence in the general assembly to prevent integration.

The governor was berated by legislators such as State Senator Garland Gray, who believed that school integration would lead to intermarriage and the destruction of white culture. Gray called together a group of white legislators and community leaders from Southside Virginia—the part of the state south of the James River, which includes Prince Edward County. The group met at a Petersburg fire station in June 1954 and declared that they were opposed to integration. Gray believed the high concentration of blacks in Southside, where he grew up, made integration impossible, and he suggested ways to circumvent the decision.

Governor Stanley changed his tune about consulting leaders of both races, and he later announced, “I shall use every legal means at my command to continue segregated schools in Virginia.” He added that, if he failed, “careful thought” should be given to repealing the section of the state constitution that required the Virginia General Assembly to maintain free public schools. At Byrd’s urging, Stanley appointed a group of white men in September 1954 to consider the state’s response to the Brown decision. Gray was asked to chair the commission that would be named for him.

In his quest to avoid desegregated schools, Byrd would coin the phrase “massive resistance”—becoming the face of the South’s defiance of Brown—and extend his reach beyond Virginia’s borders. He believed that if the Southern states could organize against the court’s decision, it would be only a matter of time before the rest of the country realized that the South would not accept integration.

IN PRINCE EDWARD COUNTY, OUT of sight of the state capitol, the Farmville Herald declared that white community leaders were “in a state of shock.” Residents already harbored a deep distrust of the federal government that went all the way back to the Civil War. Nearly a century after the war ended, they were still smarting. The final battles were fought—and lost—on the county’s productive farmland, its rolling hills.

Prince Edward County was founded in 1754 from land in adjacent Amelia County and named for a young prince, Edward Augustus, Duke of York and Albany. He was the second son of Frederick, the Prince of Wales, and the younger brother of the future king of England, George III. First inhabited by whites in the early 1700s, the county had been the hunting ground of the Appomattox Indians and other tribes. Numerous arrowheads and spearheads, along with pottery, have been found along the Little Buffalo Creek. But there is no evidence American Indians were living in the county when two groups of settlers arrived in the area that became Prince Edward. The first group came from eastern Virginia, and most were English, although some were Scotch and Welsh. The second group—Scotch Irish migrants from Pennsylvania—arrived in 1735.

The county was an agricultural oasis, two-thirds of it covered with oak and yellow Virginia pine forests ideal for lumber. There were fields of corn and wheat and hay as well as apple and peach orchards. The land also proved perfectly suited for raising tobacco, which quickly became the prized crop in colonial Virginia.

Slaves provided labor for the first farms in the county, and, along with other property, they were sold at public auction on court days and at special sales, sometimes at the county courthouse. Some of the slaves had been transported directly from Africa, while others were billed as “Virginia-born slaves.” The numbers of slaves in the county steadily grew as planting of the labor-intensive dark-leaf tobacco increased, but indentured servants and convict servants also provided labor, along with family members of the farm owners.

Farmville was founded after the American Revolution in 1798 along the Appomattox River on land owned by Judith Randolph, the widow of Thomas Jefferson’s cousin Richard Randolph. The town was one of a select few locations authorized to inspect tobacco, and by 1845 it was the fourth-largest tobacco market in Virginia, with two warehouses and ten factories. Farmers from surrounding counties brought their crop to town by wagon or canoe, and after inspection, the dark-fired tobacco was shipped by wagon or by flat-bottomed boats known as bateaux to eastern river ports in large wooden barrels, or hogsheads. The Appomattox River, which flows into the James River, connected central Virginia with commercial ports in Petersburg and Williamsburg, from which tobacco could be shipped to Europe. Trains arrived in 1854 when the South Side Railroad opened a line from Petersburg to Lynchburg, passing through Farmville as well as two other towns in the county. The route, which required a steep crossing of the Appomattox River known as High Bridge, brought an end to the commercial navigation of the river around Farmville.

Even prior to the Civil War, a significant portion of Prince Edward’s black population was independent. A community known as Israel Hill consisting of ninety free blacks was settled in 1810 and 1811 after Judith Randolph complied with her husband’s will years after his death, freeing his slaves and giving them land. The Israelites worked as farmers, bateauxmen, and skilled tradesmen, and they bought and developed real estate in Farmville. Although state laws restricted free blacks, such as one law passed in 1806 by the assembly that required free slaves to leave the state within a year unless granted special exemption, Prince Edward did not enforce these laws.

In 1861, the county’s representative to the Virginia Convention voted to support Virginia’s secession from the Union. Over the course of the war, Prince Edward County sent enough men to fill eight military companies for the Confederacy, among them blacks and students at the all-male Hampden-Sydney College. A general hospital of the Confederacy opened in Farmville in 1862 with a capacity of 1,500 beds, and those who died were buried at a Confederate soldiers’ cemetery in town.

But only at the war’s bitter end was a single battle fought in Prince Edward County. In April 1865, as the Confederates retreated from Richmond and Petersburg, General Robert E. Lee directed his soldiers to Farmville, where rations were waiting for the hungry men. As his troops pulled wagons of supplies across Little Sailor’s Creek, the advancing Union troops attacked. Nearly a quarter of Lee’s remaining men—7,700 soldiers, including eight generals—were killed or captured.

After the devastating battle, Lee ordered a portion of his troops to march to Farmville over the 2,400-foot-long High Bridge and set it on fire to keep the Union troops from advancing. On April 6 and 7, both Union and Confederate forces tried to burn the railroad trestle, which towered 60 to 125 feet above the Appomattox River valley, along with its lower wagon bridge. The Confederate cavalry took eight hundred Union troops prisoner there, then burned one end of High Bridge and set fire to the wagon bridge before retreating. But the bridge didn’t catch fire fast enough, and Union troops extinguished the fire on the wagon bridge and crossed into Cumberland County.

It was from the Randolph House’s porch in Farmville that Union general Ulysses S. Grant sent a note to Lee, who had fled town, suggesting surrender. Two days later, Lee agreed to do so in Appomattox, and, as the war ended, thousands of hungry, thirsty Confederate and Union soldiers took over farmhouses in Prince Edward and elsewhere in Virginia, confiscating livestock and pillaging dried goods, canned fruits, and vegetables.

Residents lost much, or everything. One man applied for food for his family and for the wounded soldiers who had been left at his home. Union troops set up camp, converting the Confederate hospital into a distribution center to supply the county’s black residents with food. Union troops remained in the county for weeks, but it would be years before the farmers recovered their losses. And residents would not soon forgive these unwelcome guests.

AFTER THE BROWN DECISION, PRINCE Edward’s leaders didn’t wait for the commonwealth to rush to their defense. Many believed the county’s schools would be among the first in the nation required to integrate because one of the Brown lawsuits had originated in the community. They figured that the sleepy, rural county would be held up as an example to the rest of the country, and they were not willing to stand by and let that happen. They would fight desegregation.

The person at the helm was the white-haired editor and publisher of the Farmville Herald, J. Barrye Wall, who managed his family’s twice-weekly newspaper. He led the community’s criticism of—and resistance to—the Brown decision, which he viewed as a threat to its way of life. In the pages of the community newspaper, the Brown decision never had a chance. Four days after Brown was handed down, the Herald announced its opposition to integration in an effort to shape public opinion.

“This newspaper continues its firm belief in the principles of segregation in the public schools in Southside Virginia, and hopes that a plan can be formulated to continue development [sic] the schools on a segregated basis within the framework of the decision,” read an editorial written the month of the Brown decision. “We believe it is in the best interest of all our people.”

The paper portrayed desegregation as a threat to the heart of the community and called for the county to formulate a plan to keep blacks and whites separate in schools. “The segregated races formed a citizenship, and a way of living together, which has brought phenomenal developments into the South, particularly industrial progress,” the editorial read. “This is now being changed. The opening wedge is public education on an integrated basis.”

The paper believed that blacks wanted not just “token” integration, but “total” integration, in all facets of life, “a little at a time.”

In a November op-ed, the newspaper claimed that blacks were a year to eighteen months behind whites in their ability to learn and were more mature physically, which the paper reasoned would result in a two-to-three-year differential between black and white children of the same age. The newspaper also argued that a segregated public school system had been developed because of a “difference in the background, the ability, and the desire among the races in Virginia to seek an education,” implying that blacks didn’t want to attend school or be educated and that they weren’t as smart. Black children would be demoralized in a classroom with white children, the newspaper insinuated.

And the paper repeatedly made the unsubstantiated claim that the majority of both blacks and whites in Prince Edward County wanted to maintain their own schools. “We cannot understand why so much furor has been raised in regard to the ‘rights’ of a small minority, and the rights of an overwhelming majority be completely overlooked,” a July editorial read.

Segregation was “in the best interest of all our people,” the Herald stated matter-of-factly. Integration, it wrote, was a “far-reaching concept.”

The paper raised fears that the Brown decision would contribute to the spread of communism by dividing the country, and it suggested that other regions of the United States—the North was often mentioned—were attempting to slow progress in the South. “Certainly the best way to curb [the South’s] prosperity is to foment rifts in its churches and schools,” one editorial read.

But most of the blame for the Brown decision was reserved for the NAACP, which the paper accused of conspiring against Prince Edward County, giving credence to a notion popular in the white community—one that Robert E. Taylor repeated to me more than fifty years later—that the student strike had not been organic. Editorials suggested that “forces from the outside” had selected the community for a desegregation experiment and had chosen Prince Edward to see what would happen if one community pushed back. Naive black parents had been played. “Those who had but little interest in our happiness or welfare carried far afield the original intention of the unsuspecting,” the paper editorialized. It was a claim Hill repeatedly denied, adding that he would have chosen a more metropolitan location to file a suit if it had been an option.