Road to Healing

Kaine Tim

Description

Prince Edward County, Virginia closed its public school system in 1959 in massive resistance to the U.S. Supreme Courts 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 books 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 wouldnt 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 Countys 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.

Sujets

• Histoire
• USA
• History of the Americas
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: University of Georgia Press
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781588383556
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

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.
- C URTIS W ILKIE , 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.
- J ILL O GLINE T ITUS , 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.
- D ONALD P. B AKER , 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.
- M ARK W ARNER , 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!
- J OAN J OHNS 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.
- M ARGARET E DDS , 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.
- T IM K AINE , 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
2 The Civil War After the Civil War
3 The Click of Cosmic Tumblers
4 Balm for Gilead
5 I ll Fight With You on This
6 Into the Sausage Grinder
7 Destroy the Headline to Save It?
8 Wings For a Prayer
9 The Eye of the Storm
10 Bound for Civil Rights History
11 The Promised Land
12 We Gathered Our Light
13 Reparation Within the Sorrow
14 For All Wounds Known and Unknown
Epilogue: Will We Live Happily Ever After?
Afterword
Bibliography
Index
Foreword
U.S. S ENATOR M ARK R. W ARNER
O ne 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 prop