Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County

March 16, 2015
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.

April 15, 2015

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 Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 15, 2015
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

Starred review from April 1, 2015
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 babies...nobody 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.