A Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle
by Kristen Green
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jun 2015
336 pages
Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion
Publication Information
Combining hard-hitting investigative journalism and a sweeping family narrative, this provocative true story reveals a little-known chapter of American history: the period after the Brown v. Board of Education decision when one Virginia school system refused to integrate.
In the wake of the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, Virginia's Prince Edward County refused to obey the law. Rather than desegregate, the county closed its public schools, locking and chaining the doors. The community's white leaders quickly established a private academy, commandeering supplies from the shuttered public schools to use for their all-white classrooms, while black parents scrambled to find alternative education for their children. For five years, the schools remained closed in Prince Edward County.
Kristen Green grew up in Farmville and attended Prince Edward Academy, which didn't open its doors to black students until 1986. Thirty four years after the Supreme Court ended school segregation, Green first began to learn the truth about her hometown's shameful history. As she peels back the layers of this haunting period in our nation's past, her own family's role - no less complex and painful - comes to light.
At once gripping, enlightening, and deeply moving, Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County is a dramatic chronicle that explores our troubled racial past and its reverberations today, and a timeless story about compassion, forgiveness, and the meaning of home.
"Starred Review. A potent introduction to a nearly forgotten part of the civil rights movement and a personalized reminder of what it was truly about." - Kirkus
"Absorbing... A merger of history both lived and studied, Green's book looks beyond the publicized exploits of community leaders to reveal the everyday people who took great risks and often suffered significant loss during the struggle against change in one 'quaint, damaged community.'" - Publishers Weekly
Green's work brims with real-life detail from the journalist's eye and ear and joins the likes of Diane McWhorter's Carry Me Home in further developing the dimensions of the South's desegregation struggle - particularly from the perspective of white communities - for general readers and scholars of the late 20th-century civil rights movement." - Library Journal
"Green delivers a deeply moving portrayal of one of the very sad histories in American race relations. Difficult to put down and a must-read." - William Julius Wilson, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Harvard University
"Mystery wrapped in history with a touch of suspense and personal horror: Kristen Green's stunner of a book is a ride back into a past you'll wish had never happened. This is historical sleuthing at its finest." - Chris McDougall, author of Born to Run
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kristen Green has worked as a journalist for two decades. Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County, her first book, was written about her Virginia hometown, which closed its schools rather than integrate.
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