Jo Freeman’s Review of The Road to Healing: A Civil Rights Reparations Story in Prince Edward County, Virginia

By  Jo Freeman

The Road to Healing: A Civil Rights Reparations Story in Prince Edward County, Virginia

By Ken Woodley

Forward by Mark Warner, 69th Governor of Virginia ; Afterword by Tim Kaine, 38th Lieutenant Governor of Virginia and 70th Governor of Virginia 

Published by NewSouth Books, 2019

 Reparations for slavery has been in the air this year. It comes with lots of questions. In this book, Woodley answers them for one group who suffered directly from white supremacy.

In 1959 the Prince Edward County school board closed its public schools rather than integrate them. Most white students were able to attend private academies for whites only. Black students had to leave the county or go without an education. Not until 1964 did the Supreme Court rule that the county had violated the students constitutional rights and ordered the public schools to reopen.

Author Ken Woodley

Forty years later a Virginia professor calculated that these five years without public schools resulted in 2,202 black and 258 white youths receiving no formal education in their lifetimes. He also calculated the effects of this deprivation that were passed on to the next generation. The many other effects were harder to calculate.

Prince Edward County was the defendant in one of the five cases making up Brown v. Board of Education which ended legal school segregation. That case had begun in 1951 with a student strike to protest the poor quality of the black high school. The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund stepped in with a lawsuit demanding integration, not just equalization. The Prince Edward plaintiffs won the lawsuit and lost the schools.

By 2003, attitudes had changed, if not all the practices. The Virginia General Assembly was ready to apologize for the policy of massive resistance to Brown. The Prince Edward County School Board was considering giving honorary high school diplomas to those who had been prevented from earning real ones.

In this atmosphere the editor of The Farmville Herald thought something more concrete should be done. Farmville is the county seat of Prince Edward County, where the student strike had started. The Herald and the family that owned it were major supporters of closing the schools. However, Ken Woodley, the editor in 2003, came from a different generation with different attitudes. He proposed that the General Assembly fund scholarships for those injured by the closing of the schools.