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Six months after the Brown decision, the Herald warned that there would be repercussions for desegregating schools. “Any attempt to integrate,” a November op-ed read, “will multiply present problems to an extent as to threaten the very existence of public education.” Signing off on the editorials, Wall urged his readers to stay the course against integration, adding that many looked to the county for a national solution: “Stand steady, Prince Edward!”

AS I TRIED TO UNDERSTAND what led to the school closings, I sat in Longwood University’s Greenwood Library reading through dozens of the Farmville Herald’s editorials from the 1950s, studying how the white publisher used his newspaper to advance his personal agenda—and the agenda of other powerful whites.

It was a typical move by a newspaper leader in his era. The editor of the Richmond News Leader, James Jackson Kilpatrick, took a similar stance on a bigger stage. In a series of editorials, he laid a framework for Southern politicians to push back against the Brown decision. He popularized the now-discredited doctrine of “interposition,” once championed by Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, which suggested that states had the authority to ignore federal rulings and to nullify them. Kilpatrick laid out his beliefs in a book, The Southern Case for School Segregation. “It is a way of life that has to be experienced,” he wrote, trying to explain the relationship between blacks and whites in the South.

The competing daily newspaper, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, praised Prince Edward’s leaders on its editorial page. “Your firm determination not to have mixed schools in your county is understood and supported throughout Virginia,” the paper opined. “Do not let yourselves be pushed around.”

And yet the perspective of black children and their parents rarely appeared in the newspapers. The Herald hadn’t covered the school board meetings when the conditions at Moton were discussed, and it termed the walkout organized by Barbara Johns “mass hookie.” Many of the newspapers appeared to have only whites’ interests at heart. “Wall has not felt a newspaperman’s curiosity with regard to the Negro,” Bob Smith, an editor at the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot wrote in his 1965 book, They Closed Their Schools.

I had assumed that the decision to close the schools was made spontaneously by white leaders after a court ordered the county to desegregate its schools. But as I read through newspapers from the days and weeks after the Brown decision was announced, a different story emerged. J. Barrye Wall, a native of Prince Edward who was proud that his newspaper was locally owned, staked out his public position immediately after the decision was handed down. He used his newspaper to send a forceful message directly into his readers’ homes that integration would not be tolerated. He even addressed many whites’ deepest fears: once black and white kids sat together in school, they would date, marry, and give birth to mixed-race children. He wrote that integration would result in the “destruction of two great races” and would make “the people of America a mongrel nation.”

Letters to the editor from his readers addressed concerns about miscegenation even more frankly. J. Guy Lancaster, a Farmville resident, suggested in an October letter that integrating schools would force blacks and whites “to associate closely together against the will of either race” and lead to “interracial breeding.” “Until we are sure that a greater race is produced by interracial mixing,” Lancaster concluded, “let us try to keep our races as pure as possible.”

Wall’s editorials frequently cloaked segregationist beliefs in intellectual arguments about constitutional rights and state sovereignty, notions the South had clung to during the Civil War. He mentioned the interference of communists. But he did not discuss the motivation whites had to keep blacks uneducated so that they could preserve cheap labor for their businesses and maintain the existing social hierarchy that benefited whites.

Wall’s exertion of authority didn’t end on the pages of his newspaper. He imagined an organization that would advocate for whites the way the NAACP represented blacks. Within months of the Supreme Court decision, Wall, one of his sons, and other white leaders quickly convened meetings in Prince Edward to draw up their battle plan. They also organized gatherings in Petersburg, twenty miles south of Richmond. They established a statewide organization known as the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties. The name closely mirrors the words inscribed on the Confederate monument built in Farmville in 1900—“Defenders of State Sovereignty”—a monument that served as a reminder of exactly how much had been sacrificed during the Civil War.

The Defenders drew two thousand members from thirteen counties in Southside Virginia. In counties with a racial makeup similar to Prince Edward’s—nearly half of the sixteen thousand residents were black—whites may have feared an uprising. Nat Turner’s 1831 slave revolt, which occurred one hundred miles away in Southampton County, was still on their minds. Fifty-five whites had been killed in the uprising, including Turner’s master and family, before the slave leader was kidnapped and executed.

The Defenders’ directors included state legislators, a county treasurer, a county commonwealth attorney, and members of the various county boards of supervisors. In October 1954, the Defenders secured a statewide charter, and a Farmville man became the organization’s first president. Robert Crawford, who owned a dry cleaning business, had sat on the Prince Edward County School Board for fifteen years and bragged that “the Negroes counted me as one of the champions for the cause of their schools.” Yet the organization he now headed had been formed to ensure that schools operated “on a separate basis,” he said. The organization also pledged to maintain states’ rights and individual rights, and to give voice to “an unorganized majority.” Its members devised a “Plan for Virginia”: deny state funds for schools forced to desegregate and close public schools as a last resort.

“The organization will act with determination and firmness to retain, by all honorable and legal means, segregated schools,” William B. Cocke Jr., the secretary of the organization and clerk of the court of Sussex County, told the Farmville Herald. “We are unalterably opposed to integration in the schools.”

Any applicant for membership—at an annual fee of ten dollars a person—had to agree that he was a “white law abiding citizen” of Virginia. Members were expected to believe that “the segregation of the races is a right of the state government, in the sovereignty of the several states and in the freedom of the individual from government controls.” They should not belong to “any organization detrimental to the peace and welfare of the USA.”

A Farmville chapter also formed. Within a year, the organization would have more than two dozen chapters and twelve thousand members from across the state. But its base of power was firmly situated in Southside.

SEATED AT OUR DINING ROOM table in Somerville, Massachusetts, in 2008, I’m reading a book published in 1965 about Prince Edward County’s reaction to Brown. I’m doing research for a graduate school paper I’m writing at Harvard Kennedy School while Amaya, now a one-year-old toddler, is napping upstairs.

Flipping through They Closed Their Schools, I come across a familiar name. My grandfather’s. S. C. Patteson. Papa. I reread the paragraph:

The list of officers and directors of the local Defender chapter included tobacco manufacturer J. W. Dunnington, Mayor W. C. Fitzpatrick of Farmville, Dr. S. C. Patteson, J. G. Bruce of the Board of Supervisors, former school board chairman Large, and of course, publisher Wall. There could be little doubt at this point that the Defenders had control of the organs of government in Prince Edward County.

The words leap off the page. I sit in stunned silence. Since I was a child, I have known that Papa helped establish and oversee the operations of the private school for white children. He served as a board member for at least twenty-five years. But I had pictured my grandfather traveling down a path chosen by other white community leaders, helping out, doing what was asked of him in that effort to build a new school. I thought of him as a loyal supporter, nothing more. I figured that, like other white parents, he realized that once the schools were closed, he needed to ensure his children could be educated. I had adopted my mother’s words: He was just doing what was best for his kids.

But reading this book, I realize that his role was something altogether different. My grandfather had been a Defender. And he wasn’t some anonymous member, I would later learn. He was a founding member and an officer of the organization. The book said:

The Defenders’ organizers in Prince Edward combed the ranks of the county’s staunchest segregationists to find officers of unquestioned propriety and standing in the community.

Papa had sided with other white leaders in the community, the state, and the South who impulsively announced that they would prevent integration at any cost. Papa had been willing to stand as one of the earliest advocates of this logic. And he had joined with other men who not only opposed desegregation in Prince Edward County, but, as I would later understand, actively lobbied for the county to close its schools.

I am trying to wrap my head around the new information when I hear Amaya stirring in her crib upstairs. As I pluck her from bed, I think about what I have just learned. My grandfather wasn’t simply a follower in this movement. He was a leader. I have a sinking feeling, a burning disappointment in the pit of my stomach. Helping to found a school and serving on its board was one thing. Being a Defender was quite another.

Ashamed and sad, I can no longer put all the blame on my town for the tragic school closings. My own family is at fault, too.

School districts around the South deliberately flouted the Brown decision. The ruling had not stipulated how schools should be desegregated or on what time line, and the vague wording of the decision allowed school leaders to avoid making any changes.

President Eisenhower hadn’t helped matters either. Although he had called for the desegregation of Washington, DC, schools, he had not articulated what the states should do, and he never publicly endorsed Brown. He was reportedly unhappy with the decision but knew, as president, that he had to accept it. “The Supreme Court has spoken,” he said, “and I am sworn to uphold their—the constitutional processes in this country, and I am trying. I will obey.”

Some interpreted this remark as the president distancing himself from the decision. “It makes no difference whether or not I endorse it,” he said. Later, he would tell an aide that the decision had slowed progress in the South by fifteen years.

Soon after the Brown decision was handed down, Prince Edward’s leaders began formulating ideas about how to keep the federal government from interfering with the schools. They were concerned that the county would be ordered to integrate as an example to the rest of the country. In response, the Defenders devised a drastic but simple plan: to withhold funds from the public schools. Wall, the short, plump newspaper owner and founder of the Defenders, raised the idea of abandoning public education on the opinion page in November 1954. If Prince Edward’s schools weren’t open, they couldn’t be desegregated.

Five months later, in April 1955, a group of Defenders asked the board of supervisors not to fund public schools. At the meeting that night, the supervisors delayed a decision, but the issue came up again a month later, on May 31—the same day the Supreme Court handed down a follow-up decision to Brown. A year earlier, the court had asked the attorneys general of all states with laws permitting segregation in public schools to submit plans for how they would proceed with desegregation. The new decision, which became known as Brown II, gave the task of carrying out school desegregation to district courts and suggested it be done “with all deliberate speed.”

The Supreme Court had still refused to set a deadline, rejecting Thurgood Marshall’s call for segregation to be quickly dismantled. The justices believed that great social change comes slowly. With the new decision, members of the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors expected a district court to order the county’s schools to be desegregated by September. School board chair B. Calvin Bass told the supervisors that he and McIlwaine, the superintendent, had met with the school board’s attorneys in Richmond that day, and they’d been advised that the county would be permitted to operate segregated schools for at least another year.

“That’s not good enough for me,” one man in the audience responded, and his comment was met with applause.

Standing in a crowd of Defenders, Bass urged the board of supervisors to allocate adequate money for the schools, warning that the school district’s teachers might find jobs outside Prince Edward if the schools were not funded. But the Defenders stood up one after another to ask the supervisors not to finance the schools. Ultimately, the board voted unanimously to support a proposal by Supervisor John G. Bruce, also a Defender, that called for allocating the schools the minimum amount allowed by the state—$150,000 for the year. It was far less than the proposed $686,000 school budget, which supervisors feared might be used to support integrated schools.

The board did exactly as the Defenders had asked. The supervisors’ vote to underfund the schools—hours after the Supreme Court’s Brown II decision was issued—made news across the country. The decision signaled that Prince Edward County would continue to fight desegregation, and it was a powerful foreshadowing of the more dramatic steps the county would take. The supervisors would flout the law. They did not believe the courts could force them to pay for desegregated schools.

“We shall use every legal and honorable means to continue the high type of education we proposed to give the children of both races in Prince Edward County,” Edward A. Carter, chairman of the board of supervisors, wrote in a statement, adding, “I don’t believe integration will serve to elevate or make better citizens of either race.”

DAYS LATER, FORTY-FIVE COMMUNITY LEADERS—among them Defenders and presidents of the white public schools’ parent-teacher associations—formed the Prince Edward School Foundation. They began making plans to establish a private school for white children, the academy that would, in some ways, define my family. My grandfather, like other white parents in town, would help establish the school and sit on its board. Both my parents would attend, and later they would enroll my three brothers and me. My aunt and uncles and some of my cousins would go to school there, too. My father would chair the parent-teacher association and sit on the school’s board of directors. My mother would spend twenty-five years working as a guidance counselor at the school, and my youngest brother would teach and coach there, too.