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Betty Jean made new friends at Foster, but she often wondered if the education she was getting was as good as the one she would have received in the Prince Edward schools. Sometimes she thought about why all this was happening, why she had been separated from her brother and sister, why she had to go to school in a different community and live away from her parents during the week. She questioned her dad about the reasons the schools had been closed.

“The whites don’t want black kids to be with their kids,” her dad would tell her. “They feel you’re below them.”

“Because of the color of my skin?” she responded, trying to understand.

“Yes,” he told her. “Because of the color of your skin.”

He said he didn’t think what the white leaders had done was right. “You’re just as good as anybody else,” he assured her. “That’s why you need to get your education.”

He could make sure she went to school, but he couldn’t bring back the happy, innocent life she had had before her family was split by the school closures. With her brother and sister gone, there were no rowdy family meals, no friends coming and going, no arguing among the siblings. Her dad worked longer hours to help pay for the things his children needed away from home, picking up odd jobs painting or pumping gas after his shift at the college ended.

Betty Jean wished they were all back together again. But after the schools closed, the three children would never again sleep under the same roof, except during the holidays.

“It was terrible,” her brother Ronnie told me. “We just broke our family up.”

THAT SUMMER, DOROTHY LOCKETT WAS sitting on the back steps of her house in Prospect when her dad came home and broke the news that she would not be returning to school the next month. Leonard Lockett, a railroad worker, assured his ten-year-old daughter that she would be educated. “Whatever’s happened, I promise you’re going to go to school,” he told her.

Dorothy was devastated. She loved school and tried to keep learning at home. The family owned one storybook, which she and her brothers read repeatedly. Her dad bought the newspaper and asked the children to read articles aloud to him.

When Griffin opened the training centers around the county, Dorothy and her older brother Edward walked three miles each way to attend classes in the basement of a church. On rainy days, Lockett gave Dorothy his railroad-issued raincoat to keep her dry. She hated the walk, which was two miles longer than the one to her old school. When the white school bus passed by, children leaned out the window and spat.

Peaks Elementary, the three-room school she had attended before the schools closed, was nothing to brag about. Six grades were crammed into one room and an outhouse was the only bathroom. The schoolbooks were torn, and she would select whichever book had the most pages. It wasn’t until the schools closed that she realized not all students read torn books, not all schools were overcrowded, not all children used an outhouse at school. Still, she couldn’t help thinking that at least Peaks had been a real school.

Another older brother, a standout athlete who had been preparing to start his junior year at Moton, decided he was done with school. Dorothy’s parents didn’t want to split up their children, and, at eighteen, he didn’t want to walk to the training center. But Dorothy and Edward kept walking. As one year turned into two, Dorothy often thought about her father’s promise. She never stopped asking him about it.

“Dad, when are we going to go to a real school?”

Finally, he had had enough. Leonard Lockett decided he couldn’t wait any longer for the schools to reopen. His three oldest children hadn’t finished high school, and now his fourth had quit, too. He was determined not to let the same thing happen to his youngest two children. He and his wife, Alma, had completed only the sixth grade, but Lockett believed schooling was invaluable and wanted Edward and Dorothy to get a real education.

His white coworkers at the railroad helped him rent a house eighteen miles away in Appomattox County, where they were working on a railroad project. The decrepit two-story wood-framed house sat on the edge of a highway. He and Alma spent weeks working to make it appear habitable. He replaced broken window panes and cleared debris from the yard. His wife sewed burgundy curtains for the front windows.

It wasn’t until the school year started that Dorothy realized her family wasn’t moving. They would continue to live in the house they owned in Prince Edward, but they would pretend this rented Appomattox house was their home. Each school day Leonard Lockett dropped off Dorothy, Edward, and three grandsons behind the house. As he left his children and grandchildren to drive to work, he instructed them to stay outside, behind the house. The structure wasn’t safe for them to be inside. He told the children that when they heard the bus roaring down the country road, they should walk through the back door, out the front door, and onto the bus.

Lockett told the children it was important to keep the secret. “You just get on the bus, keep your mouth shut, and go to school,” he told them.

Edward didn’t think it would be difficult. “We have pretended for two years that the church was our school, and now we just have to pretend that this is our house,” he told his sister.

Dorothy and the other kids all played along. They knew this was serious business. “We didn’t want to risk not being allowed to go to school,” she said.

Carver-Price School, attended by black children in first through twelfth grades, was only miles from the elementary school she had attended in Prince Edward County, but it seemed a world away. It had a cafeteria, a gymnasium, and shiny, clean hallways.

Soon Leonard Lockett invited other Prince Edward families to bring their children to his rental home in the morning, too. Everett Berryman and his siblings had been dropped off on the side of the road so that they could catch a bus to the Appomattox schools. Now Everett sometimes joined the Locketts behind their rental house. At one point in the school year, twenty-one children from ten families boarded the bus there.

“We’d fill the bus up,” Dorothy said.

The bus driver laughed and joked that they didn’t look like siblings, noting that a number of the kids were in the same grades. The children didn’t say a word. They knew their educations were at stake.

RICKY BROWN WAS SIX, AND he couldn’t wait to start school. For years, he had watched his older brother and cousins go off every morning. Each day, as the bus approached to fetch the kids, they sang a song they’d made up. “School bus, school bus, give me a ride,” they crooned.

Ricky’s cousin Freck, named for a face full of freckles, had started school in 1958—the year before the schools closed. Ricky was next. “I was waiting for my turn,” he told me.

He was excited for kindergarten. On what would have been the first day of school, he got dressed in his new school clothes. Then his mom broke the news to him that the schools wouldn’t be opening, but he didn’t understand. “Those damn crackers closed up the schools!” she said.

It was something they rarely discussed. His mother felt there was nothing she could do. Ricky’s father had left the family when Ricky was two. His mother, one of ten children, was the daughter of illiterate sharecroppers. She learned to read and write, unlike most of her siblings, but she had dropped out of school at sixth grade. Now she did domestic work for white families around town and worked in a tobacco factory. She wasn’t particularly concerned about her children being educated. Feeding them was a more pressing concern. Besides, she didn’t have the resources to send her three children anywhere else.

Ricky’s paternal grandparents, who lived in neighboring Cumberland County, took in Ricky’s older brother, Walter, so that he could attend school. Ricky, who was five years younger and less independent, was not invited. His grandparents didn’t think they could handle both boys. Instead, Ricky was stuck at home with his sister, Frances, who was four. He was angry about being left behind, and he was jealous of his brother. “I thought I should have been able to go, too,” Ricky said. “I couldn’t understand why it happened.”

Instead of continuing his education, Ricky spent every day playing. He waded in the creek behind First Baptist Church, and, while his mom worked, he went to visit his aunts who lived nearby. He played ball in the soft green grass at the firehouse. At night, he went home to the duplex his mom rented for five dollars a month on South Street, where the walls were so thin he could smell the next-door neighbors’ dinners and hear their conversations. Occasionally, he joined seventy-five students at one of the training centers in the basement of Griffin’s church. Classes, which ran for three and a half hours, were taught by volunteers since most black teachers had left the county to find other jobs.

“The only thing I got out of that was how to spell my name and the alphabet,” Ricky said. “That’s all I learned.”

NO ONE WENT LOOKING FOR Doug Vaughan when the schools closed. He lived in a poor neighborhood on the hill above Buffalo Shook Company, the Farmville sawmill. The saws ran all day long, until the whistle blew at 4:30 p.m. No one asked if the fifteen-year-old being raised by a single mother wanted to go away to school. During the week, she worked downtown as a cook at the Hotel Weyanoke, often bringing home pork chops or chicken for dinner. On the weekends, she liked to drink, so Doug and his three siblings had to look out for each other. Kids raising kids. “Nobody wanted to bother with us,” Doug said.

When the schools closed, he was entering the eighth grade. He couldn’t count on his mother or anyone else to plan for his future. It was in his teenage hands.

Doug asked an uncle in Philadelphia if he could live with him and attend school. Doug scraped together money for a bus fare and headed north, but the school charged tuition when officials realized that Doug was from Prince Edward. He was back in Farmville a few weeks later.

When Doug turned sixteen, he told his older brother, “We’ve got to get out of here.” They left Farmville with a couple of his brother’s friends for Mount Vernon, New York, where they rented a room in a spacious house for ten dollars a week. Doug worked for Good Humor Ice Cream Company, riding a bicycle from neighborhood to neighborhood for seven hours, selling ice cream out of a bucket. His brother and his friends didn’t have jobs yet, so Doug would stop by the house they rented and feed them the ice cream he was supposed to be selling. Ice cream was breakfast and lunch, and Doug never made any money. For dinner, the boys bought heaping bowls of lima beans for a quarter from the corner market. It would be a month before they could afford a real meal.

Doug’s brother found a job at a vacuum cleaner factory, which hired Doug, too. But soon, he would leave the North and head back home for a girl who had stolen his heart. He could barely read, but he would not return to high school.

Without an education, the road ahead would be a steep one.

WHEN THE SCHOOLS CLOSED, MICKIE Pride was nine years old and about to enter fifth grade. No one explained to her what had happened or why. “It meant nothing to me,” she said. “All I knew was I was going to have an extended vacation from school.”

Her family lived eighteen miles south of Farmville in a black community. Mickie attended the two-room Virso School, which housed grades kindergarten through twelve. There was no running water or indoor plumbing, and the school was heated with one big woodstove. The facilities were basic, but Mickie didn’t know any better. She liked school, and her teacher told her she was smart, moving her ahead from second to fourth grade.

When the schools closed, Mickie did nothing for the first year. The next year, her mother arranged to send her to neighboring Lunenburg County. But after thirty days, Mickie was sent home when Lunenburg opted not to educate Prince Edward students. After that, she spent her days with her mother and three of her siblings. Mickie’s mom, Mae, didn’t drive, so attending one of the training centers wasn’t an option. The children simply stayed home. The family didn’t have a phone or a television, but a constant stream of friends visited. Her aunt and her aunt’s sister were always around. “They’d come and sit all day,” Mickie told me.

When she grew tired of listening to the adults, she’d go outside and play with her brothers and sister. They’d rake up big piles of leaves and hide in them, jumping out to frighten her dad, Arvesta, when he arrived home from work at the sawmill. And she spent hours playing jack rocks—the poor man’s version of jacks, in which small rocks replaced jacks and a larger rock served as the ball.

Mae had a knack for styling hair, and friends popped by to gossip and get their hair pressed. Mae used oil, then a hot comb heated on the stove, to straighten their hair. While the adults talked and laughed, Mickie thumbed through magazines and mail order catalogues from Sears, Roebuck and Company, and Montgomery Ward. Her family didn’t own any books, but sometimes one would be tucked inside the packages of hand-me-down clothes and shoes her aunts and uncles sent from the white families they worked for. “We read everything we could get our hands on,” Mickie said.

THE FOUNDERS OF FARMVILLE’S NEW private academy had pitched it as a school for all the county’s white children. But some of the county’s poorest white kids, kids like John Hines, the son of a tenant farmer and logger, never set foot inside it.

White leaders had promised that the school would be free to all white children for the first year—its operating expenses would be covered by donations. But Shadrick Hines didn’t see it as an option for his children. Maybe he knew he wouldn’t be able to pay for bus fees or other costs that might crop up. Or perhaps he thought he would eventually be pressured to pay tuition.

No one from the academy tried to change his mind. No one told him to put his kids on the bus and that they’d figure out a way to cover the cost. No one said it was important for poor white children to get an education, too.

Besides, Hines, a second-generation logger, and his wife, Margaret, had attended school for five and seven years, respectively. Their limited education had served them well. Even though Shadrick Hines never learned to read and write, he could count money, and that’s what mattered in his line of work. That, and working fast in the fields.