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.