Author Event: Ken Woodley - The Road to Healing

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. The Road to Healing by Ken Woodley is his first-person account of the steps taken in recent years to redress the wound. The history is as important for its insights about the past as it is about what it has to share about a way into our future