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“In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw a line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny. And I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.”

Six months later, in June 1963, Wallace would “stand in the schoolhouse door” to block two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from enrolling at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. When the president called for one hundred troops from the Alabama National Guard to assist, Wallace stepped aside. But the violence Wallace seemed to condone, if not advocate, had followed his inaugural address with cross burnings, night ridings, and police beatings. Black youth would launch sit-ins and a boycott of stores to protest Birmingham’s segregation policies, and the violence would only mount as the year wore on.

In Prince Edward, Bobby Kennedy and the president stepped up the pressure. In January 1963, Bobby Kennedy referred to Prince Edward as “a disgrace to our country.” President Kennedy personally deplored the school closures in a special civil rights message to Congress in February. He pledged publicly to “fulfill the constitutional objective of an equal, nonsegregated educational opportunity for all children.” In private, he urged his brother to make progress in the county before September. And if he hadn’t already made it clear that he considered Prince Edward an embarrassment, Bobby Kennedy cited the county by name at the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation in Louisville in March. “We may observe, with as much sadness as irony, that outside of Africa, south of the Sahara where education is still a difficult challenge, the only places on earth known not to provide free public education are Communist China, North Vietnam, Sarawak, Singapore, British Honduras—and Prince Edward County, Virginia,” he said.

The NAACP kept the pressure on the White House to intervene, with more than seven hundred people signing a letter to the president requesting a more sophisticated remedial instruction program. The Virginia Teachers Association also planned to request a more concerted federal action on behalf of Prince Edward’s schoolchildren, calling the long-closed schools a “blot on the American image.”

After Wallace tried to prevent black students from enrolling in the University of Alabama, the president went on national television and proposed what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He deemed civil rights a “moral issue,” saying it was “as old as the Scriptures” and “clear as the American Constitution,” adding that America “will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.”

The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who will represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?

“One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free,” he added.

That night, Medgar Evers, a thirty-seven-year-old Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP known for his role investigating Emmett Till’s death, was gunned down by a white supremacist in his Jackson driveway as he arrived home, where his wife and three children had been watching the president’s speech.

IN FEBRUARY 1963, THE PRESIDENT had discussed the situation in Prince Edward County with his advisers and directed them to find a way the federal government could help. The challenge: the federal government couldn’t operate schools or finance them. A few months later, Robert Kennedy assigned a Department of Justice aide to the county.

William J. vanden Heuvel, a tall thirty-three-year-old who was the president of the International Rescue Committee, spent much of the summer traveling between DC and Farmville, talking with state and local officials and sharing his progress with the Kennedy administration. The student-led demonstrations had peaked in late July when students were arrested on the steps of the white church. Vanden Heuvel, named an assistant attorney general, gradually established communication between black and white leaders in Prince Edward. Avoiding the legal dispute over whether the county was required to operate public schools, he was able to hammer out a solution that was amenable to the community and his boss: a temporary, free private school for black children and any white students who wanted to attend.

Governor Harrison, Griffin, and segregationists alike signed off on the plan, which called for an integrated staff and student body. The agreement to open the private school would enable state officials to continue fighting against public school integration in Prince Edward and black leaders to keep pressing for it. The Department of Justice assured Griffin that the court case would be fast-tracked and lawyers would argue before the Supreme Court for the schools to be reopened.

“The temporary solution has been endorsed by the Justice Department, the NAACP—practically everybody involved in the seemingly endless dispute,” wrote U.S. News & World Report.

The governor, who had taken no action in Prince Edward, was under pressure to find a solution after a summer of protests in Farmville. He announced in August that schools would open in the county the next month. A biracial board of directors of three whites and three blacks, and headed by former University of Virginia president Colgate W. Darden Jr., would establish an independently run school in four public school buildings. The new Prince Edward Free School Association, known as the Free Schools, would cost a million dollars to operate for one year and would be funded with donations from the Ford Foundation and the Field Foundation, as well as the National Education Association and parent-teacher organizations throughout the country. The private school would recruit its faculty from across the US.

In the same month, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the NAACP and the Department of Justice’s attempt to force the reopening of the county’s public schools, claiming that “there is nothing in the 14th Amendment which requires a state, or any of its political subdivisions … to provide schooling for any of its citizens.”

The decision was a blow to the administration. But after four years, black children would finally have a school to attend in Prince Edward County. The Free Schools would soon be up and running.

TWO WEEKS AFTER THE GOVERNOR’S announcement, several dozen Prince Edward residents, most of them students, boarded buses before the sun came up. They were carrying fried chicken in shoeboxes, bound for the nation’s capital to participate in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

For some, the road trip felt like a religious experience. It was many students’ first time outside Virginia, and they sang fight songs on the long bus ride. They had spent the summer demonstrating, and at the March on Washington the students could celebrate the commonality they felt with other Southern blacks protesting segregation. When they arrived, they walked to the Lincoln Memorial carrying a huge “Prince Edward” banner, securing a spot near the steps where they witnessed Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. Betty Jean Ward dipped her feet in the reflecting pool.

King referred to the summer the Farmville youth had spent protesting, boycotting businesses, and conducting sit-ins and a church kneelin as the “sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent.”

“Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice,” King instructed the crowd.

The end of his speech spoke directly to the ongoing struggles of Prince Edward’s black families, who had sacrificed so much in their quest for desegregated schools. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” he told the crowd.

It was their dream, too.

AFTER THE AGREEMENT TO OPEN the Free Schools came together, a superintendent, Neil V. Sullivan, was hired with three weeks to spare. Sullivan took a one-year leave from the same position at East Williston School District in Long Island, New York. His to-do list was long: prepare school buildings that hadn’t been used in four years, oversee repairs to twenty buses, hire administrators and one hundred teachers, stock the cafeterias, and order textbooks and equipment. He had been warned that three of the school facilities—the former Moton High School, now known as Mary Branch No. 2; Mary Branch No. 1; and Worsham Elementary School—needed repairs to roofs, floors, and walls. Only the new Robert R. Moton High School was in decent shape. When Sullivan finally toured the schools, he found them in “deplorable condition,” with “dirt, dust, and rubbish” everywhere.

“I could only conclude that the powers that be in Prince Edward County had written [the schools] off entirely,” Sullivan later wrote in his memoir Bound for Freedom. “Apparently they had never had any intention of reopening public schools once the private white academy was established… . Floorboards were rotting; plaster had fallen; water had penetrated walls. Wastepaper baskets had not been emptied when the schools were closed, and the stench from the contaminated remains was sickening,” he wrote. Although maintenance workers had already begun cleaning, Sullivan wondered whether the buildings could be readied in a matter of weeks.

He was appalled by the lack of equipment in the schools, particularly in the brand-new Moton High School. There were few books on the library’s shelves, no textbooks in the classrooms, and one lone microscope to teach 650 students biology.

The buses were in dire shape, too. “Those buses are still standing right where they were parked four years ago,” the public school superintendent, T. J. McIlwaine, told him. “Drivers just turned off the ignition, got out, locked ’em up, and there they are.”

At Mary Branch No. 2, which served as the headquarters for the Free Schools, parents had lined up to register their children, who were getting checkups and vaccinations from a doctor while they waited. Teacher candidates trickled in, too. Sullivan had hired several teachers from other states after interviewing them by phone. Other administrators had reached out to former colleagues and Peace Corps volunteers to staff the school. After several weeks of recruiting, Sullivan had lined up only fifteen teachers, including his wife. When he reported to vanden Heuvel the difficulty he was having, the assistant attorney general offered to reach out to the National Education Association to help locate qualified candidates. “I’ll move heaven and earth to find them for you,” he told Sullivan.

The superintendent didn’t want just anybody. He warned candidates that they would have their work cut out for them. Many of the children returning to school would not be able to read, and some wouldn’t be able to recognize the alphabet, count to ten, or tell time. But he told potential teachers that he was excited about the innovative way they would be teaching that year. The Free School would offer a crash program in reading and mathematics. The goal was to make up lost ground as quickly as possible. Instead of putting students in classes with other children their age, Sullivan planned to group them by need and ability—an innovation he had implemented in New York, with good results. The students would move up as they progressed, and teachers would spend all day teaching in their area of expertise, such as reading or math.

The plight of Prince Edward County’s schoolchildren had caught the attention of the nation, and teachers from around the country wanted to help. Half of the teachers hired for the Free Schools were from out of state, and they took pay cuts to leave cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. Others came in from West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland, Florida, Wisconsin, and California. One quarter of the teachers were white, making the Free Schools one of the first integrated teaching staffs in Virginia.

Days before the school was scheduled to open, Sullivan still needed twenty more teachers. He asked Virginia State College to send student teachers, and some left Petersburg for Prince Edward before learning if they would be paid a salary and reimbursed for their expenses. It was difficult for future teachers to say no to this challenge, to work with children who had lost so much through no fault of their own.

TENSIONS WERE HIGH ON SEPTEMBER 16, 1963, the day the Free Schools were to open. The previous morning, a bomb had exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four black girls. Earlier that week, three all-white schools in the city had desegregated by federal court order. The church had served as a meeting place for civil rights organizers like King and as the starting point for many of the protest marches in Birmingham.

The bomb detonated on the east side of the building, killing fourteen-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson, and eleven-year-old Denise McNair. Fourteen others were injured, including Addie Mae’s sister, twelve-year-old Sarah Collins, who was sprayed with glass and lost an eye in the explosion. After the bombing, riots broke out in Birmingham, and two black boys, Virgil Ware, thirteen, and Johnny Robinson, sixteen, were also killed. Governor Wallace sent five hundred National Guardsmen and three hundred state troopers to the city. The next day, hundreds more police officers and sheriffs’ deputies would join them.

This violence terrified Prince Edward parents, who worried that their children would be in harm’s way as they returned to school. No physical violence against black youth had been reported in the county, but parents and school officials were edgy just the same. A handful of white children would be attending the Free Schools, and Sullivan’s reception in town had been icy. He had received threatening letters at his hotel, and calls came in nightly demanding that he leave town. “Go on home, you nigger lover!” one caller advised him. Another night, when a call came in at 2:00 a.m., an exasperated Sullivan shouted back. “Go to hell!” he yelled into the phone. “I’m staying.”