Making Up for Lost Time

Aldrena's effort, and those of 60 or so others, is a reminder of how deep ran-- still runs -- the damage done by segregated schooling and the efforts of many leaders to preserve it. It is a reminder of how the suffering of that period, now forgotten by almost everyone who did not live through it, lingers in the souls and selves of people who had the misfortune to grow up during a time when the nation was trying to change its own character and, in places, failing. The alacrity with which mature adults came forward to seek money that would enable them to sit, once again, at a school desk, is a reminder of how crucially important education was to them as children, and how important it remains. It is a reminder, too, that there are still casualties from the civil rights era: people who did not lose their lives, but who lost something irreplaceable nonetheless.

Because, in truth, making up for what was lost during the nation's transition to integrated schooling is a lot to accomplish, even if you do have a scholarship.

THE SCENARIO: Dylan, a black lawyer, is in a hurry. He has just come from the gym. He has to fly to L.A. in a couple of days for work. It is a Sunday. Dylan needs to get into his office. He can't find, for the moment, the ID badge that will allow him into his firm's parking garage. In a car in front of him is another lawyer, Hope, a white woman. She inserts her card and drives through.

Before the gate closes, Dylan also drives through. Seeing this, Hope gets out of her car, approaches Dylan and demands to know why he is following her. Dylan tells her who he is -- he recognizes her; she doesn't recognize him -- and she goes back to her car. Dylan forgets about the encounter until he learns that Hope complained about him to their supervisor. In return, Dylan complains about her attitude, which he believes was motivated by racism.

What does the class think about this? Was race a factor? In Hope's response to Dylan? In Dylan's response to Hope?

Andrew Johnson, a professor who is teaching a course in business ethics to a group of Brown scholarship recipients, stands at the front of a classroom looking at the seven students sitting before him. Most, if not all, are older than he is. It's about 7:30 in the evening; the sun is going down, and the smell of mown grass permeates the air. Once a week, two professors are dispatched to Farmville by St. Paul's College, a small, historically black college 1 1/2 hours away in Lawrenceville, which has created a special program so that recipients living in the Farmville area -- many do -- won't have to commute for classes.

Waiting for an answer, Johnson looks at Carl Eggleston, a county politician and funeral home director, who was 8 years old when the schools closed in Prince Edward. Eggleston spent two years helping in his father's furniture repair business before his family rented a house in Cumberland County so that he and his siblings could take classes there. Johnson looks at Barbara Spring, who missed all five years, because she lived in a farm, and there were lots of chores ("you're never too young and never too short," the children were told), and everyone was needed. He looks at Henry Cabarrus, who at 14 was an incredibly promising student, so smart and ambitious that everybody knew he would be a doctor. During the first year of the closings, Henry worked the land owned by his grandfather, George Morton, an independent farmer who was injured and, for the first time in his life, at risk of going into debt. Henry's skills were such that not only did he run the farm well enough to turn a profit, but he completed and filed his grandparents' income tax return. The next year, he heard that the American Friends Service Committee--the Quakers--was sending Prince Edward students to live with families around the country. "I was just screaming to get the heck out of there," says Henry, who talked his reluctant grandparents into letting him go. At 16, he found himself sitting with a few classmates on a train to Yellow Springs, Ohio, and realizing that they did not know whether they could use the public bathroom. None of them had ever been outside a segregated system.

Henry, a wiry, energetic man now in his early 60s, is sitting on the edge of his seat, intently thinking about Hope and Dylan. The spot where the class is sitting is literally where everything started. Back in 1951, this modest brick building was the county's only high school for black children. Built in 1939 to accommodate 180 students, Robert Russa Moton High School had no gymnasium, no cafeteria, no science lab, no athletic field and not nearly enough room for the more than 440 students who ended up streaming in from homes and farms throughout the 353-square-mile county. "School was very important to me and my classmates; we didn't have a lot of other things to do, like kids do now," recalls another affected student, Rita Moseley. "We were very focused and eager to learn." To accommodate the overflow, a few ad-hoc structures were erected, built out of plywood and tar paper. The tar paper shacks had no plumbing -- in the United States, in 1951--and no heat except for wood stoves.

So stark was the contrast between the black high school and the one serving white students that in 1951, an outspoken 16-year-old named Barbara Johns organized a walkout to pressure the county to make good on its promise to build a better-equipped school for black children. When the county dithered and pled penury, the students sought help from the NAACP, which was embarking on a plan to desegregate schools throughout the nation. The NAACP decided to make the students' cause its own; rather than sue Prince Edward for a new black high school (which the county, as soon as it saw what was happening, scrambled to build), the NAACP sued for no more black high schools, period. And no more white high schools. NAACP lawyers joined the students' case to four other desegregation lawsuits, including one involving a Kansas student named Brown. And with that, Prince Edward became party to one of the nation's most transformative Supreme Court decisions, which, when it came down in 1954, was referred to as Brown v. Board of Education for the simple reason that alphabetically Brown comes before Davis, the name of the lead plaintiff in the Prince Edward case.

Of course, much of the South resisted the court's desegregation order; as the journalist Bob Smith points out in his book about Prince Edward, They Closed Their Schools, although many Southern states could barely afford a single school system, they were determined to keep running two. In Virginia, the resistance was particularly feverish: Year after year, state politicians came up with plans to thwart integration. The most notorious of these, "massive resistance," called for Virginia to respond to the federal order to integrate public schools by closing them down. A few counties did so (the Brown scholarship also applies to affected students, white and black, in those counties), but the state eventually backed down from such a radical and self-destructive maneuver.

All except for Prince Edward.

In Prince Edward, white resistance had been growing more organized and vocal since the walkout, and not only because Prince Edward was a poorer, rural county with a large black population, where many whites felt especially threatened by the prospect of black equality and economic competition. What really set Prince Edward apart was the racist pugilism of the editor of the local paper, a cigar-smoking businessman named J. Barrye Wall Sr., who used the editorial page of the Farmville Herald to share his view that the NAACP was in league with the Communist Party to destroy the fabric of American society through the integration of the races. Wall also used the news pages to raise funds for the private Prince Edward Academy, created to serve white students. It was a textbook case of the impact one determined person can have: Wall met little resistance from even progressive-minded white people, though some did exist.