Making Up for Lost Time

The NAACP responded with a second lawsuit, asking the courts to decide whether a local government must provide public schooling. And it thus happened that the short-term needs of the Prince Edward black students were sacrificed to the unexpectedly long-term struggle to get this crucial question decided. As the case wound through the legal system, civil rights leaders came to Farmville to urge students to hold fast. "In your leisure, you can gather more in basic education than you would get in five years of Jim Crow schools," proclaimed Oliver Hill, a NAACP lawyer, optimistically. And when white community leaders offered to set up a private school for black children, the NAACP saw this for the trap it was. For the NAACP to prevail in court, it was necessary, ironically, that the black students' needs not be provided for.

Eventually this case -- Griffin v. School Board of Prince Edward County -- also reached the Supreme Court, which ruled that local jurisdictions must provide public schooling. "From Prince Edward comes the constitutional right of all the children in America for an education," points out the Herald's Ken Woodley, who grew up in Richmond, attended Hampden-Sydney College in Prince Edward and never heard a word about the school closures until he went to work at the paper. Learning of what happened, he says, he felt "numbness and shock." Woodley has modeled himself as the antithesis of J. Barrye Wall and has spearheaded the scholarship drive and aimed to show what one determined person can do to try to make things right. "Talk about a contribution to American history that is unknown -- that's what the black community in Prince Edward gave to this country."

Communitywide, there has been an attempt to recast the county's history, emphasizing its role in the civil rights struggle. In the 1990s, Woodley and others mounted a campaign to turn the old black high school into a historic building. Moton High has been converted into a museum, the anchor of the state's Civil Rights in Education Heritage Trail. In 2004, the county celebrated the 50th anniversary of Brown. Ceremonies have been held to award honorary high school diplomas to the adults shut out as schoolchildren. In 2003, when the General Assembly was considering a formal apology to the black students of Prince Edward, Woodley hatched his plan -- it came to him while driving to work -- to provide not only an apology, but also a concrete outlay of scholarship money. He saw it as reparations, and initially envisioned the money going to all the affected students and even to their children.

Some of those who eventually qualified after the legislative compromises are now sitting before Johnson, who also went to high school in Richmond, a few years after many of his students. "We never could figure out why the Prince Edward basketball players were so much bigger than we were," Johnson tells the class; now, he realizes that it's because the Prince Edward players were 20- and 21-year-olds, grown men returned to high school after a five-year-hiatus. Johnson also reflects on the impact the closings had on the county in discouraging industry from settling there. According to the 2005 census, Prince Edward has a median per capita income of $14,500, compared with $24,000 statewide, and the percentage of people living below the poverty level -- 18 percent -- is almost double the 10 percent figure statewide. "Who knows what might have happened if Farmville had been socially responsible?" Johnson says.

What's striking is the students' measured response to the Hope-Dylan imbroglio, which was assigned as outside reading. The class is part of an accelerated one-year-program St. Paul's created for Brown scholars who had some college credits already; students will graduate this May with a B.S. in business. In another classroom, more basic courses are being held for students who lacked any college credit and who will later be funneled into the business program. Like many adult students, they are motivated and engaged; in his written analysis, Henry Cabarrus decided that Hope and Dylan both used "tools of racial profiling" to model their responses to one another, and that the best policy, were he their supervisor, would be to get them together to talk.

Carl Eggleston has a different point of view. "I don't think it was racial," he says. "I just think she was an aggressive-type person."

The day before this class, Eggleston lost the mayoral election to a white incumbent. Years ago, he successfully sued the Farmville Town Council to abandon its at-large system of voting and make it more possible for blacks to be elected. Farmville has never had a black mayor. "We've made some progress, but not enough," Eggleston says.

Johnson continues to present scenarios meant to probe how racism may -- or may not -- be operating in the American workplace. "You go to a cocktail party, you're a junior associate. Your boss asks you to get him a drink: Do you do it?" says Johnson, adding, "This happens every day in corporate America."

"I would feel singled out in some way," Eggleston says this time. "I can't believe it's in my job description to go get alcohol for someone."

"I would get the drink," a woman replies, "but after that I would have to go back to my Scripture."

"I REMEMBER THE ONE TIME I saw my mama get mad at a white person," says Aldrena, trying to evoke for Mykhayla what life was like for her growing up. "One of the doctors examined me when my mother wasn't there, and it was, I guess, inappropriate. And when I was coming back out I told her, and my mom went back in there, and I never did know what she said to him."

Aldrena is navigating her Subaru through downtown Farmville, which has always been a small town. In Aldrena's youth, it was surrounded by more small farms than it is today. In addition to doing domestic work in a white neighborhood, Aldrena's mother worked her own property in Prospect, growing vegetables, raising animals, cooking huge meals on the wood stove in her kitchen. Aldrena's father was mostly away from home, working in Baltimore; because of the lack of economic opportunity in the area, it was not uncommon, particularly in black families, for one parent to seek better-paying work in a city.