Word: blacks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Prince Edward has a sort of archaic rural beauty, with sleek Black Angus cattle grazing, hay baled in cylinders in the fields and an enveloping sweetness of landscape and seasons. It is -- or was -- a peculiar charm of the county that virtually everyone knew everyone else, and spoke with outward courtesy. Most of the families, black and white, have roots that go back 200 years, their lives, for good and ill, entwined. The blacks lived in intricate dependency upon the whites, who owned the land and held the power. But the foundation of white paternalism was segregation: when segregation...
Vanessa Venable was teaching ninth grade in the black school system in 1959 when the county shut down the public schools. The blacks knew nothing in advance. "I went to school one morning," Mrs. Venable remembers, "and the superintendent told us that Prince Edward County had gone out of the education business. I was shocked. It was like you had been living with vipers all around you and didn't know...
When the public schools reopened, 1,600 black children came to class . . . and four whites. The private white schools flourished, eventually moving into handsome quarters upon 53 acres in Farmville, the county's commercial center. The public schools struggled along in a state of mediocrity, trying to repair the damage. Vanessa Venable remembers a 13-year-old girl standing at a blackboard. She was asked to add 34 and 26. She began to weep uncontrollably. She did not even know how to write a number. So she and Mrs. Venable stood at the blackboard for long minutes, crying hopelessly together...
...Prince Edward County's public schools had the lowest test scores in Virginia. But in the years since then, the public schools have made a gradual and remarkable recovery. Now Prince Edward County High School's student body is 62% black, 38% white. The tuition to attend the white private school (some 630 white students and six black) is now $2,495, and many white families have decided they can find a superior education (free) at the public schools. Even white families from surrounding counties are applying. Test scores for students in the public schools now approach the national average...
Prince Edward County never had racial violence, or the lynching meanness that seeped up in those years in Alabama and Mississippi. But the bruise of the past is deep. The students segregate themselves, black clusters and white clusters, in the school cafeteria. They struggle to describe the abiding significance of race in Prince Edward County. They cannot quite find the word for what they suspect in the hearts of the other race. Not "prejudice." Not "hatred," not "intolerance," exactly. It is, they say, something hidden, and always there...