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Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Combining hard-hitting investigative journalism and a sweeping family narrative, this provocative true story reveals a little-known chapter of American history: the period after the Brown v. Board of Education decision when one Virginia school system refused to integrate.
In the wake of the Supreme Court's unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision, Virginia's Prince Edward County refused to obey the law. Rather than desegregate, the county closed its public schools, locking and chaining the doors. The community's white leaders quickly established a private academy, commandeering supplies from the shuttered public schools to use in their all-white classrooms. Meanwhile, black parents had few options: keep their kids at home, move across county lines, or send them to live with relatives in other states. For five years, the schools remained closed.
Kristen Green, a longtime newspaper reporter, grew up in Farmville and attended Prince Edward Academy, which did not admit black students until 1986. In her journey to uncover what happened in her hometown before she was born, Green tells the stories of families divided by the school closures and of 1,700 black children denied an education. As she peels back the layers of this haunting period in our nation's past, her own family's role--no less complex and painful--comes to light.
At once gripping, enlightening, and deeply moving, Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County is a dramatic chronicle that explores our troubled racial past and its reverberations today, and a timeless story about compassion, forgiveness, and the meaning of home.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Green's absorbing first book follows the town of Farmville, Va., focusing on its bifurcated school system (black and white, public and private) and evolving racial culture over six decades, from the massive resistance to school integration in the 1950s and 1960s to the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors 2008 resolution that "the closing of public schools in our county from 1959 to 1964 was wrong." Farmville was Green's hometown; she, her siblings, her parents, and other relatives attended the all-white Prince Edward Academy. She uncovers a "painful history hidden in plain sight," learning that her grandfather was not "some anonymous member" of the white-supremacist Defenders but one of its founders, and exploring the other life of the family's black longtime housekeeper ("As a child I never imagined that Elsie had a life before us"). Green interviews extensively (family, old friends, administrators, teachers) and scours contemporaneous media coverage. The remarks she elicits from African-Americans who were denied public schooling by Prince Edward County are particularly affecting. A merger of history both lived and studied, Green's book looks beyond the publicized exploits of community leaders to reveal the everyday people who took great risks and often suffered significant loss during the struggle against change in one "quaint, damaged community." Agent: Laurie Abkemeier, DeFiore and Company. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In reaction to the Brown decision ordering desegregation of the nation's public schools, the school board of Prince Edward County in Virginia dismantled its public school system rather than obey the Supreme Court ruling. Prominent white citizens quickly established a private school for white children whose parents could afford the tuition and left black and poor white children to fend for themselves. For five years, black families sent their children across the state and the nation to live and go to school or resigned themselves to no education. The gross inequity of the school system even before it shut down had provoked a protest among black students that later led to a lawsuit challenging the closing of the public schools, an effort that triumphed after five long years. Green grew up in tiny, rural Farmville in Prince Edward County. She attended the white private school that her grandfather had helped to establish and her mother had attended as well. Married to a mixed-race man and mother of mixed-race daughters, Green returned to her hometown to uncover the shameful truth about its history, interviewing black residents still seething with resentment and white residents still in denial about the impact of their decision. Green has rendered a deeply moving account of historical injustice and a personal search for redemption for her family's role in it.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ON SEPT. 10, 1959, black students in Prince Edward County, Va., watched as school buses full of white children rolled through the streets, delivering their charges to the newly opened Prince Edward Academy. To resist court-mandated desegregation, the local school board shuttered the public schools, but not before white volunteers stripped classrooms of desks, books, and supplies for the new academy. Local Jaycees ripped out the high school stadium's goal posts and transplanted them to the white-only academy's football field. Kristen Green, who graduated from the Prince Edward Academy about three decades after it opened, returned to her hometown in 2006 to research the county's controversial past. She blends history and memoir in a gripping narrative that revolves around her discovery that "Papa," her beloved grandfather and a well-regarded local dentist, was a segregationist who played a key role in the decision to shut the public schools. Prince Edward County's schools had long been a case study in separate and unequal. Through the late 1930s, few black students received a full 12 years of formal education. Many learned the basics in informal schools run out of private homes. Others crammed into a local elementary school that offered some courses through the 11th grade. In 1939, the district built an all-black high school. Within a decade, its eight classrooms, all on a single floor, housed 477 students; converted school buses and tar paper shacks handled the overflow. In 1951, amid intensifying civil rights protests nationwide, black high school students staged a strike to protest conditions at the shabby high school. They wanted a new building. But the N.A.A.C.P., joined by parents of 117 students, demanded more. They filed a lawsuit calling for the desegregation of the district's schools. In 1952, the Supreme Court bundled together the Prince Edward case, along with four related cases, in Brown v. Board of Education. When, in 1954, the Supreme Court issued its unanimous ruling against racially separate schools in Brown, white Virginians mobilized against it. A group of civic elites, many from Prince Edward County, including Green's Papa, founded the Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties. They devised a "plan for Virginia" to protect segregation by denying state funds for integrated schools and, as a last resort, to shut down schools to prevent racial mixing. Prince Edward's school board began funding the public schools month-to-month, ready to pull the plug if they were forced to integrate. The Defenders couched their defense of racial segregation in the venerable language of rights and liberty. But those rights and liberties, in Prince Edward County, had one purpose: to allow whites to protect their privileged position and to gut public education to do so. Prince Edward's school board resisted the Brown decision for five years. But in 1959, when an appellate court ordered the district to comply, local white leaders established the Prince Edward Academy with businesslike efficiency, raising several hundred thousand dollars and appointing a retired Standard Oil executive to direct operations. But like so many ostensibly private institutions, the academy depended on public resources. Not only were its classrooms stocked with stolen supplies, but in 1960 (until a judge ruled it illegal after a year), county residents could earmark up to a quarter of their property taxes for donations to the academy. Green attended the all-white school that her grandfather helped found, in a county where about a third of the population was black but where she knew hardly any black people other than her grandparents' maid. But Green - now in her middle age - paints herself as an innocent lost, a depiction that rings a little hollow, given her own history. After college, she fled the South, lived in places like San Diego and Boston, worked as a journalist and started researching Prince Edward County while she was a graduate student at Harvard's Kennedy School. She is rather reticent about her own motives, other than a vague sense of "shame and guilt" about her family's past, though she marries a mixed-race man (to whom her grandmother "never warmed") and settles in racially diverse neighborhoods, including her current home in Richmond, Va. She may not have known that Papa was a Defender, but as an adult, she rebelled against the segregated world he had defended. When Green listens to the stories that she never heard growing up and asks impolite questions, her writing is powerful and persuasive. She writes of older whites' unwillingness to talk about the county's troubled past. "I am tired of rehashing this thing," one of her high school teachers tells her. "I just want to move on." Green gives voice to Elsie Lancaster, the domestic who raised her mother, vacuumed her grandparents' house, and ironed their clothes, and stayed late at their cocktail parties, a woman who listened a lot, but who knew that her job depended on her silence. In 1959, when the schools closed, Green's grandmother coldly suggested to Lancaster that she should "get a group together and open up a school," as if they could marshal the resources that the town's wealthy whites could. Lancaster cared a lot about education, particularly for her only child, Gwen, who was 12. But she had one choice and it wasn't the Academy. Gwen, recalled Lancaster, was "one of the smartest kids in her class, and she just wanted to go to school." Like many parents, Lancaster had higher aspirations than domestic work for her daughter. She made the painful decision to send Gwen north, to live with relatives in Cambridge, Mass., and finish her schooling there. "Elsie never got to be her mother again," writes Green. "Not the way she wanted." BLACKS IN PRINCE EDWARD COUNTY still talk about a "lost generation." A lucky few hundred moved out, some hosted at a black college, others fostered by Quaker families in eight Northern states. But most stayed, and their education suffered. Some took rudimentary classes in makeshift "training centers" in church basements. Many just stayed at home or if they were old enough, started working. They struggled for their rest of their lives to make up their educational deficits, most never gaining the skills to move up the economic ladder. In 1961, a group of black parents filed suit against the district. In 1963, Prince Edward blacks led boycotts of local businesses, hoping to pressure civic leaders to open the public schools once again. Finally, in 1964, under a court order, local officials removed the padlocks, scrambled to put the gutted classrooms back in order, and reopened the public schools. For the most part, whites opted out. The battle for Prince Edward County left lasting scars. Local voters, a majority of them white, refused to pay higher taxes to support the public schools. Whites with financial means, including Green's parents, sent their children to the "segregation academy." "I tried very hard to convince myself that the public schools would be fine," remembered Green's mother, "but I just couldn't send you there." Finally, in 1984, the Academy, facing the revocation of its tax-exempt status, announced that it would admit students of any racial background. That amounted to little more than tokenism. Today, the majority of students in Prince Edward's public schools are black; but only 5 percent of the private academy's are. Prince Edward County is no longer the backwater it was in 1959, but there is still little support for the public schools, little will to undo decades of unequal education. Separate and unequal has a new face in Prince Edward County today, with liberty and sovereignty for some. Whites with financial means sent their children to the 'segregation academy.' THOMAS J. SUGRUE is a professor of history and social and cultural analysis at New York University and the author of "Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North."
Kirkus Review
A powerful memoir of the civil rights movement, specifically the dramatic struggle to integrate the schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia. Little-remembered today is the story of the late-1950s closure of the Prince Edward public schools and the fate of its black children, who were either deprived of education or separated from their families and dispersed into other states. At a commemoration 50 years later, journalist Green and other participants were told how "the Prince Edward story is one of the most exciting pieces of American history, in part because the struggle of young people against discrimination resulted in a Supreme Court ruling." That ruling was Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (1964), which ordered the schools to integrate. Despite the ruling, however, another 22 years would pass before the county's all-white academy was integrated. While local black students had contributed to Brown with their 1951 school strike, which they named their "Manhattan Project," Green reminds us that their segregationist neighbors believed the integration would contribute to making "the people of America a mongrel nation." Well before integration became an order, they were ready to padlock the schools and divert resources to their race-based replacement. In 2008, Green, a graduate of the whites-only academy, discovered that her grandfather had taken a lead role in the project from the beginning, in order "to maintain the purity of the white race" and avoid the raising of "half-black, half-white babiesnobody wants." The author movingly chronicles her discovery of the truth about her background and her efforts to promote reconciliation and atonement. Her own experience in a racially mixed marriage provides a counterpoint. A potent introduction to a nearly forgotten part of the civil rights movement and a personalized reminder of what it was truly about. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In what she calls a hybrid of nonfiction and memoir, newspaper reporter Green revisits the history and memories of her hometown, Farmville, in Virginia's Prince Edward County to recollect how its people experienced the battle over desegregating public schools after the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education declared separate educational facilities to be unequal. After sketching the culture of Farmville in the advent of Brown, Green probes the decision's aftermath as the all-white school board stigmatized Prince Edward County by closing its public schools from 1959 to 1964 rather than integrating them. She traces the opening of Prince Edward Academy in 1960 (from which her parents and she would later graduate), as local white leaders established "whites only" private schools while essentially locking African Americans out of school. Mixing family, local, and oral history with personal realizations and reminiscences fitted into a national backdrop, Green describes the pains and hopes of people in one Southern town as they struggled with desegregation from the 1950s into the 21st century. VERDICT Green's work brims with real-life detail from the journalist's eye and ear and joins the likes of Diane McWhorter's Carry Me Home in further developing the dimensions of the South's desegregation struggle-particularly from the perspective of white communities-for general readers and scholars of the late 20th-century civil rights movement.-Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
A Note to the Reader | p. ix |
Prologue | p. 1 |
Part I Separate But Not Equal | |
1 A Perfectly Charming Southern Town | p. 7 |
2 Homecoming in Black and White | p. 23 |
3 Prince Edward Joins Brown v. Board of Education | p. 37 |
4 My Family's Part | p. 57 |
5 Locked Out | p. 73 |
Part II The Lost Generation | |
6 The Segregation Academy | p. 89 |
7 Waiting and Seeing | p. 101 |
8 Nigger Lovers | p. 115 |
9 "You Go Where Your Parents Tell You To" | p. 121 |
10 Elsie's Other Life | p. 133 |
11 The Hour Is Late | p. 139 |
12 A Bus Ticket and a World Away | p. 147 |
13 Then and Now | p. 159 |
14 Brown Stokes the Flames | p. 163 |
15 Two Steps Forward, One Step Back | p. 177 |
16 Building a Life Without a Foundation | p. 199 |
Part III Integration | |
17 "We Are All God's Children" | p. 207 |
18 The Schools Today | p. 221 |
19 "We All Wish It Hadn't Happened" | p. 237 |
20 A Healing Place for the Community | p. 245 |
21 The New Normal | p. 259 |
Epilogue | p. 267 |
Acknowledgments | p. 273 |
Notes | p. 277 |
Recommended Reading | p. 303 |
Index | p. 305 |