Review of Kristen Green's "Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: A Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle"

Many of the best books about school desegregation take a close look at the grass roots and examine how policy changes and the responses to those changes affected the lives of the people most directly involved.  Sometimes outsiders have gotten to the core of the experience—one thinks of J. Anthony Lukas’ Common Ground:  A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (1985), set in the Boston busing crisis of the early 1970s.   But the most vivid, telling narratives often to come from participants—several members of the Little Rock Nine have written memoirs, such as Melba Patillo Beals’ Warriors Don’t Cry (1994), which gains a special immediacy from Beals’ use of her diaries from the time.

Journalist Kristen Green’s Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County combines outsider’s and insider’s perspective, which may explain why parts of her story don’t come into sharp focus.  She was, and in some ways remains, an insider: born in remote, rural Southside Virginia after the crisis that led to the closing of Prince Edward County’s schools between 1959 and 1964, she attended the all-white “private” academy that her town’s leaders established to avoid integration.  College and career took her away from Farmville and led her to racial views far different from those of her parents and grandparents.  She returned to Virginia in 2006, living with her mixed-race husband and their two daughters in a Richmond neighborhood she happily and repeatedly characterizes as diverse.  Going back to visit her childhood hometown to research a history of Prince Edward County’s protracted struggle with school desegregation, she repeatedly finds herself torn between affection for people she has known all her life and distaste for their poisonous beliefs and destructive practices.  Often she seems downright bewildered: how could apparently decent people be so blind and so mean?

Her late, beloved grandfather—whom she still calls “Papa”—provides probably the most wrenching case.  Green had always assumed that he had gone along with the crowd to establish the segregated academy because he simply wanted the best education for his grandchildren.  But a little digging reveals that he was a prime mover, a founder of the imperiously-named “Defenders of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties.”  “Papa” is gone, but the survivors from his generation are reluctant to talk about what happened a half-century and more ago, making it hard to find the facts and reconstruct the full narrative of Prince Edward County’s travails.  Whether from embarrassment or honest forgetting , friends and family tap-dance around the facts, resort to euphemism, sound defensive:  “You know,” her mother finally tells her, “We all wish it hadn’t happened.”  Green says she finds these words liberating.  But to this reader, at least, some ambiguity remains. 

Green’s vision is less cluttered and tentative when she writes as a journalist, not just as a memoirist.  Long before she was born, her little town was an archetype of apparently genteel segregation, the races separated politely but absolutely. Moton High School, built by the county for black students in the late 1930s, was intended to serve fewer than 200 students.  It soon bulged at the seams, enrolling almost 500 students, and was deteriorating rapidly.  In 1951, Barbara Johns, a student there, led a student walkout to demand a better facility.  The NAACP upped the ante and filed a lawsuit to desegregate the schools—a lawsuit that became one of the cases resulting in the Brown v. Board of Education decision.  In 1959, when a court ordered Prince Edward County to integrate, the school board closed the public schools, and the “Defenders of State Sovereignty” and their allies, ready for the day, set up their all-white academy, furnished in part with items stripped from the public schools.

Green is especially effective at capturing the stories of the “lost generation” of black students and their families, who had to scramble to find schooling.  Most vivid is Elsie Lancaster, the family’s housekeeper, whose daughter, Gwen, eventually went to live with relatives and attend school in Cambridge, Massachusetts—just one example of how families were broken up in order to survive.  (“Elsie never got to be her mother again,” says Green.  “Not the way she wanted.”) Other black students went to live with sympathetic Quaker families in the North.  A series of ad hoc, ad lib attempts at schooling tried to educate the majority who remained.  For them—and for the many who never went back to school—keeping their families together exacted a heavy price in lost skills that they have paid for the rest of their lives.

Even after a court ordered in 1964 that the public schools be reopened, white parents continued to send their children to the “segregation academy,” and the public schools languished.  Only when a court threatened to take away the academy’s tax-exempt status did it integrate.  Today, renamed Fuqua Academy in honor of a wealthy, Southside-born benefactor who gave the school a generous endowment on the condition that it be open to students of all races, it has leaders who speak enthusiastically of “diversity.”  The public schools have changed, too, with black students representing only 57 percent of the student body.  But, Green ruefully notes, they are seriously underfunded and underperforming, and “black students are disproportionately represented, comprising the majority of the student body but only one-third of the county’s population.”

An ambivalent ending, for sure.  Looking back across four generations of history in Prince Edward County, Green picks her way through the silences, the evasions, the obfuscations, the self-deceiving hypocrisies, and yearns for healing.  But of course the ending is not yet—it may well take who-knows-how-many-more generations.   Kristen Green’s book—both its narrative of the past and its author’s sometimes unintentional revelations about how hard it is to come to grips with that past—gives us a clear idea of just how much will be involved in getting there.