Word: edwardes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Prince Edward County's whites established a private school system for their own children, and offered to help blacks do the same. The blacks insisted on integrated public schools. Black families that were lucky sent their children to relatives in other counties or states where the public schools were open. But many of the children went five years without entering a classroom. At last, the Supreme Court ordered the public schools reopened, and racially integrated. By that time, a generation of Prince Edward's black children had been profoundly wounded. Many have never recovered. The drama blew a hole...
...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...
...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...