Road to Healing, The: A Civil Rights Reparations Story in Prince Edward County, Virginia

By Tim Kaine, Ken Woodley and Mark Warner

Prince Edward County, Virginia closed its public school system in 1959 in "massive resistance" to the U.S. Supreme Court's historic Brown v. Board decision of 1954. The editorial pages of the local family-owned newspaper, The Farmville Herald, led the fight to lock classrooms rather than integrate them. The school system remained closed until the fall of 1964, when the County was forced by federal courts to comply with the school integration ordered by Brown. The vast majority of white children had continued their education in a private, whites-only academy. But more than 2,000 black students were left without a formal education by the five-year closure. Their lives were forever changed.

A Civil Rights Reparations Story: The Road to Healing in Prince Edward County, Virginia, by Ken Woodley, is his first-person account of the steps taken in recent years to redress the wound. The book's centerpiece is the 18-month fight to create what legendary civil rights activist Julian Bond told the author would become the first Civil Rights-era reparation in United States history; it was led by Woodley, then editor of The Farmville Herald, still owned by the original family. If the 2003-04 struggle to win passage of a state-funded scholarship program for the casualties of massive resistance had been a roller coaster, it wouldn't have passed the safety inspection for reasons of too many unsafe political twists and turns. But it did.

The narrative unfolds in Virginia, but it is a deeply American story. Prince Edward County's ongoing journey of racial reconciliation blazes a hopeful and redemptive trail through difficult human terrain, but the signs are clear enough for a divided nation to follow. The history is as important for its insights about the past as it it about what it has to share about a way into our future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth Books
• Release date: Apr 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781588383556

Tim Kaine

Senator Tim Kaine has represented the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States Senate since 2013. He was the Democratic Party's nominee for Vice President of the United States in the 2016 election, running alongside Hillary Clinton, and the governor of Virginia from 2006 to 2010.

Book preview

Advance Praise for The Road to Healing

Reparation is a buzzword, even in the case of educations lost for victims of Virginia’s monstrous campaign of massive resistance of sixty years ago, the goal of which was to defeat the integration of public schools. But as Ken Woodley tells in The Road to Healing, a plan to provide scholarships to compensate for a five-year shutdown of these schools helped spur racial reconciliation in the state’s Prince Edward County, thus proving the value of such efforts. This remarkable book describes both an important episode in our civil rights history and how enlightened leadership helped heal the wounds it caused.

— CURTIS WILKIE, Overby Fellow and Kelly G. Cook Chair of Journalism at the University of Mississippi, author of Dixie: A Personal Odyssey Through Events That Shaped the Modern South

Ken Woodley provides a powerful insider’s account of the struggle to establish Virginia’s Brown v. Board of Education Scholarship Program to provide academic opportunities for those denied an education by their own elected officials during the massive resistance years. Probing the nature of reconciliation and the still-open wounds of racially motivated school closings, Woodley powerfully reminds readers that real apologies demand tangible action, and that while the past cannot be changed, the present most certainly can.

— JILL OGLINE TITUS, author of Brown’s Battleground: Students, Segregationists, and the Struggle for Justice in Prince Edward County, Virginia

Talk about speaking truth to power! As the editor of a small-town, family-owned newspaper, Ken Woodley crusaded for decades to get his community to renounce its past devotion to segregation, a cause that had been championed before he got there by his own paper. Driven by deep spirituality and tenacious resolve, Woodley not only succeeded, but persuaded the Virginia legislature to pay reparations to the victims.

— DONALD P. BAKER, retired Washington Post journalist and author of Wilder: Hold Fast to Dreams, the biography of America’s first elected black governor

Barbara Johns lit the lamp and Ken Woodley used it to help light the way for the rest of us. That is a lesson worth repeating across every generation. The ultimate lesson of The Road to Healing is that you often do not cure the great ills of the world by grand gestures. You start small, and it is always best to begin in your own backyard.

—MARK WARNER, U.S. Senator and former Virginia Governor

As someone who was directly and indirectly affected by the shameful history in Prince Edward County, I truly believe God sent Ken Woodley as one of his shepherds to heal the racial divide and help us move towards reconciliation. The Road to Healing is a gripping account—candid and informed—of Woodley’s efforts to right a terrible wrong in the wake of what happened in Virginia in the years between 1959 and 1964. An emotional, powerful must-read!

— JOAN JOHNS Cobbs, sister of civil rights history-maker Barbara Rose Johns

Some true stories surpass fiction in their ability to amaze, to inspire, and to impose symmetry on a chaotic world. Ken Woodley’s work to bring racial healing to Prince Edward County, Virginia, is one such story. That this small-town newspaper editor did so much good occupying a seat where so much destruction was once sown is a kind of miracle.

— MARGARET EDDS, author of We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team that Dismantled Jim Crow

Woodley has been an untiring witness, or in the words of Isaiah, an ensign of the people, heralding the deeper meaning of the Prince Edward story. The Road to Healing shows the extent of that labor, the twists and turns, the compromises and momentary disappointments, and the slowly growing wisdom of a community—indeed an entire nation—turning from past to future. But the work is never done. And we so need examples to help us persevere in that work. I thank Ken Woodley for giving us such an example.

— TIM KAINE, U.S. Senator and former Vice Presidential nominee

NewSouth Books

105 S. Court Street

Montgomery, AL 36104

Copyright © 2019 by Ken Woodley

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.

Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Woodley, Ken.

The road to healing: a civil rights reparations story in Prince Edward County, Virginia / Ken Woodley ; foreword by Mark Warner ; afterword by Tim Kaine

p. cm.

Includes photos, bibliography, index.

ISBN 978-1-58838-354-9 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-58838-355-6 (ebook)

1. Woodley, Ken. 2. African Americans—Civil rights—Virginia—History—20th century. 3. African Americans—Civil rights—Southern States—History—20th century. 4. Civil rights movements—Civil rights—Virginia—History—20th century. 5. Civil rights movements—Civil rights—Southern States—History—20th century.

II. Title.

2018051191

Full Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data available at www.newsouthbooks.com/roadtohealing.

Design by Randall Williams

Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books

To my wife, Kim,

for saving my life so I could write this book.

To John Hurt—locked out of public schools for five years after

the first grade by his own community—for giving it a hero.

To U.S. Senator Mark Warner who, as governor

of the Commonwealth of Virginia, stood tallest and strongest

with us when we needed it most.

And to Barbara Rose Johns,

for having the courage to dream.

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Prologue

1‘God, Please Help Us. We Are Your Children, Too’

2The ‘Civil War’ After the Civil War

3The Click of Cosmic Tumblers

4Balm for Gilead

5‘I’ll Fight With You on This’

6Into the Sausage Grinder

7Destroy the Headline to Save It?

8Wings For a Prayer

9The Eye of the Storm

10Bound for Civil Rights History

11The Promised Land

12We Gathered Our Light

13Reparation Within the Sorrow

14‘For All Wounds Known and Unknown’

Epilogue: Will We Live Happily Ever After?

Afterword

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

U.S. SENATOR MARK R. WARNER

One of my heroes, Barbara Johns, is central to the story you are about to read. I never had the privilege of meeting her, but this young woman demonstrated righteous courage and fearless leadership in 1951 when, at the age of sixteen, she organized and led a student walkout to protest conditions at the all-black Robert R. Moton High School in Prince Edward County, Virginia.

Moton was very separate and vastly unequal from the other public schools in the county. Moton held more than twice the number of students it was built to accommodate, yet the local school board refused to build a new high school for African American students. Instead, they erected tarpaper shacks. The rooms were freezing in winter, and water dripped from the ceiling and walls when it rained.

Barbara Johns was justifiably frustrated by the struggles she faced simply to access the free public education guaranteed in the Virginia Constitution to every child born in the Commonwealth. With the help of lawyers from the NAACP, Barbara and the Moton parents filed a civil rights lawsuit to integrate Prince Edward County’s public schools.

Their lawsuit ultimately became one of the five cases that the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed in the historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, which anchored the Court’s historic decision to declare segregation in public education to be fundamentally unconstitutional.

In later years, Barbara Johns was modest about her courage. Our heroes tend to be like that, don’t they? There wasn’t any fear, she later said. I just thought—this is your moment. Seize it.

That same drive is what motivated Farmville Herald editor Ken Woodley to push us to establish scholarships for a generation of African American students denied a public education when some public schools in Virginia, and in Prince Edward County the entire public school system, were closed in defiance of the Court’s integration decision.

The ultimate lesson of Woodley’s The Road to Healing is that you often do not cure the great ills of the world by grand gestures: you start small, and it is always best to begin in your own backyard.

I think you will enjoy Woodley’s absorbing and detailed account of our combined efforts leading to the 2004 creation of the Brown Scholarship program in Virginia. Along the way, The Road to Healing also succeeds in documenting nearly three decades of recent Virginia political history as Woodley details his interactions with many of the leading personalities, and discusses the often complicated politics, that got caught up in the effort.

In 2004, our administration was working mightily to win Virginia General Assembly approval for a once-in-a-generation fix for Virginia’s structurally unbalanced budget. That larger budget struggle ultimately was successful, after no fewer than three high-stakes special legislative sessions. And by reforming our budget and tax system, Virginia was well positioned to keep its commitments in public education, job creation, public safety, and the protection of our natural resources.

In the following pages, Woodley will put forth his suspicions that during that 2004 budget struggle my personal commitment to the Brown Scholarship proposal somehow became diminished. As you will discover, nothing could have been further from the truth.

Once we had secured bipartisan legislative support for our 2004 budget reforms, other budget priorities quickly fell into place—including the Brown Scholarship program. That was due, in many ways, to the dogged persistence of Ken Woodley and many others. As you’ll also read in Woodley’s lively account, the effort also received an unexpected assist from Virginia philanthropist John Kluge, who was moved by news coverage of the goals of the Brown Scholarship proposal, and agreed to personally match the state’s financial commitment to launch the program.

During my four-year term as Virginia’s sixty-ninth governor, I also was pleased to find another opportunity to publicly honor and celebrate the example set by Barbara Johns and her Moton classmates. During an evening stroll early in my tenure in Richmond, my youngest daughter Eliza pointed out that there were a lot of statues on the grounds of the Virginia State Capitol complex: George Washington, Patrick Henry, Stonewall Jackson, and dozens of other Virginia historical figures are there, proudly memorialized in bronze and stone.

My daughter asked a simple, but poignant, question: where were the statues of women? And what about people of color? Her questions prompted us to raise private funds to construct the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial, which stands on Capitol Square in Richmond today. It honors a series of Virginia’s heroes—and heroines—in the fight for freedom. Appropriately, the figure of Barbara Johns is a centerpiece of that Memorial.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way. That’s certainly what Barbara Johns did: standing up for what was right, no matter the consequences, and changing history as a result. Barbara Johns lit the lamp and, as you’ll read in the pages that follow, Ken Woodley used the light from that lamp to help point the way for the rest of us. That is a lesson worth repeating across every generation.

The author with his mother, Lorraine Suggs Woodley, in the yard of the family’s home in Farmville in the late 1950s. (Photo by James K. Woodley Jr.)

Preface

Ilook at a photograph taken in Prince Edward County in the fully bloomed spring of 1959, five years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. The world, itself, was unprepared for what was about to happen. Even in this small black-and-white photo it’s clear the sky was too blue. The leaves on the trees too green. The sun too warm on the skin. There was no sign of onrushing doom anywhere.

Something inside me still trembles. I see my two-year-old self and the street beyond the front yard of the apartment my parents rented, a few rooms downstairs in one of the neighborhood’s Victorian houses. I was born in Farmville, the county seat of Prince Edward County, in 1957 while my father completed his final two years at Hampden-Sydney College, six miles down the road.

Within that photograph, the world appears to be perfect. And it was, for me, with my blond hair, blue eyes and white skin. They were my passport to any seat on the bus, any lunch-counter stool—liberty and justice for me. I hold that apparent Eden in the palm of my hand with great care, as if it were a priceless artifact. In fact, it is the rarest and most impossible of artifacts.

In the picture, the world looks just the way God made it. But the snapshot lies. It is an artifact of a world that did not exist, even as the shutter captured it on film.

Such black-and-white photographs were the only way those colors were ever integrated in Farmville in the 1950s. Beyond the border of those photos Prince Edward County was about to shatter for African American children. The sun would still shine indiscriminately from a blue sky and through green leaves onto the community’s children. But the sun would be alone in doing so.

There I am, a happy child playing on a tree-shaded lawn on High Street. But just four blocks away, turning left on Main Street, the county’s Board of Supervisors was poised to shut down an entire public school system and keep it closed for five years. Minds would stay closed even longer.

I had never heard of massive resistance when I arrived to work at the Farmville Herald following my May 1979 graduation from Hampden-Sydney College. I had no idea Prince Edward County’s public school system had been shut down. Nor did I know that the newspaper at which I had just been hired led the public fight to lock those school doors.

My ignorance was the product of design. The American history contributed by African Americans was confined to brief glimpses as I’d grown up. Their agony and achievements were generally no more than footnotes in the voluminous history told by whites.

I was born there and lived Farmville for the first two years of my life. But my parents were natives of Richmond. We lived in Farmville only until my father graduated from college in May 1959. Prince Edward County is located in the central-southern Piedmont of Virginia. Tobacco was king. So was segregation. My father proudly received his diploma and two weeks later—just as Prince Edward County’s Board of Supervisors was preparing to eradicate the public school system—moved to Richmond, where I was raised.

When I learned what had happened in Prince Edward County, and the Farmville Herald’s role in massive resistance, I felt that life had parachuted me behind enemy lines. How could I stay and work for this newspaper? The same family owned it. The same pro-massive resistance editorial writer—the newspaper’s publisher—was in place. Had I known any of that, I never would have applied for the job. I never would have walked through the door for any reason whatsoever.

I attended two schools with student bodies that were 80 to 90 percent black from fall 1970 to summer 1973 during court-ordered busing to achieve integration in the city of Richmond’s public schools. Those three years confirmed the belief I’d had since I was a small child that people are people. The color of someone’s skin had no deep meaning for me. It was just skin.

I had a crush on one of my English teachers at Thomas Jefferson High School, the young and beautiful Miss Lewis. Most of the boys did. On the last day of the 1972 school year I brought my camera and took her picture. Miss Lewis was black.

I might have run like hell at the first opportunity to leave the Farmville Herald. I nearly did. But through the cacophony of those emotions I felt a quiet call to stay, to somehow find a way to use this newspaper to help heal the wound it had done so much to create. But what could I do? What could anyone do? Was I on some delusional, ego-driven wild goose chase?

A 1994 letter from Oliver Hill, the legendary civil rights attorney, was a foundational moment in my life. The great attorney, whose statue stands in Richmond, and who, along with Barbara Rose Johns, is one of those honored by the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial at the state capitol, wrote this to me:

I thank you for sending me copies of your well written news statement and brilliant editorial pertaining to the recent celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the Brown decision.

It was one of the tragedies of the times that during the fifties and succeeding years we did not have more people with your insight and sensitivity to help work out solutions to our racial problems in . . . Prince Edward County, in Virginia and in the rest of the United States.

I will be quoting from your writings from time to time as I speak on these racial problems."

Those words from that man blew breath on the flame already burning deep inside me. To this day, I feel that letter was my ordination as a minister of racial healing and reconciliation, a laying-on of hands, a commissioning. Hill knighted me as surely as my early childhood imaginings saw King Arthur doing, tapping me on both shoulders with Excalibur in his quest to find the Holy Grail. But, rather than give me a sword, Hill empowered my pen to fullest effect.

The letter revealed that the calling I felt to use the editorial pages of the Farmville Herald to help bridge the wounding chasm massive resistance had left in the county was not an ego-driven fantasy of self-delusion.

Oliver Hill—he was going to be quoting me?!—made it clear that any ability I had to express my heart was a gift from God and I had been placed in the middle of the community that needed it most. The newspaper had used its position of influence on behalf of separating the races through massive resistance. I sought to amplify the volume of its editorial pages to unite a deeply wounded community in a journey of recovery toward one another. That dream surely was not mine alone, but only one dreamer in the community was lucky enough to be the editor and editorial writer of this newspaper.

The Brown decision, I wrote in that May 20, 1994, editorial,

is something to celebrate and cherish or else America’s founding ideals as expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are no more than gnats in a strong wind. Those eighteenth-century words, which meant nothing in the lives of African Americans, were given a touch of legitimacy by the Supreme Court’s decision on May 17, 1954.

The nation’s founding documents and Brown mean something, I continued, because they are

more than a collection of words on paper. The words were keys that began unlocking a series of doors closed and rusted on their hinges.

For African Americans, No taxation without representation meant much more in 1954 than it had meant to the colonists two hundred years earlier. The reality of America in the mid-twentieth century, juxtaposed against the idealism of its founding in 1776, revealed a heavy irony in the iron chains society forged, visibly invisible, to lock African Americans out of their birth right as American citizens. All men created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights? Among those life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

Brown v. Board was instrumental in taking the unwritten lie out of those words.

In its own way, the exchange of words from the heart between Hill and me was a microcosm of what I was determined to strive for within Prince Edward County. It was a pivotal moment for me because it demonstrated that my hopes, and the dream of Barbara Rose Johns, were within reach. Hill would be quoting the editor of the Farmville Herald as he spoke about our nation’s continuing racial problems. This time, Hill would not be condemning what an editor of the Farmville Herald had written, but praising it, embracing it.

Oliver Hill would be quoting a newspaper that once had been the bitterest of enemies to the cause he had fought for in court on behalf of the black community of Prince Edward County. This showed me that the world could indeed turn toward a new day. There can be racial reconciliation. There can be healing. We can live, as Barbara Rose Johns dreamed, happily ever after. Or, at least we can join together in the pursuit of happiness.

As I looked back on my life while writing this book, trying to decode the origin of my racial sensibilities, I knew that my first experience with African Americans was classically stereotypical. My maternal grandfather was a well-to-do physician in Richmond and had a live-in cook/housekeeper six days a week, as well as a gardener. From infancy onward, I had a great deal of contact with them both, especially with Helen Byrd. I would spend hours playing with a wooden train set in the laundry room just off the kitchen, where she spent much of her day.

But there was a twist in the stereotype: That man and that woman performed jobs that my own parents did. Robert Hatchett cut the grass, just