Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County: A Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle by Kristen Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is a lovely, kind book. It is a memoir more than a history book – although it is heavily documented and researched. Ms Green tells the story of her own childhood and young adult years in Prince Edward County, growing up in a family that, like other people, made the most of their fortune of being white in a society that rewarded being white.
Prince Edward County was a flash point of the integration struggles of the 1950s in America. A young black girl determined to make a change, called a student strike at the segregated black high school for better education and a better school building – and set off a chain reaction that led to the five-year-long closure of all public schools in the county, the development of a private whites-only school partially funded by the state, the intervention of a President and his Attorney General, and the eventual collapse of resistance to the arc of the moral universe as it bent toward justice in this town in central Virginia.
Ms Green’s story is about her own life, of course, but also of her parents, who were among the first students in the segregated school, as well as her own grandparents, who were among the founders and trustees of Prince Edward Academy.
The author weaves the history of segregation and racial tensions in Virginia, in her county, and by extension in America both in the Old South and elsewhere. Along the way the author explores her own feelings and thoughts about what she is learning as she discovers not just the place of her family, neighbors, and friends in the continuation of a segregated society, but also in how little discomfort this segregation caused upon any of them.
In comparison, those who were affected by segregation and the closure of the schools had enormous affects, starting from the loss of a critical element of a modern society – the guarantee of a free, public education – and the matching loss of dignity and worth in that modern society that did not consider their pain, their dreams, their worth – or even what all Americans lost when they so cruelly treated the least among them.
One of the best things about the book is the unblinking honesty of the writer about her own thoughts, her own feelings, her own journey. She did not make this a “nice” book that speaks from someone who is unaffected by her discoveries, or someone who has everything figured out and can now tell the rest of us how she overcame her own issues. It is a great book for that reason, that she does not try to hide the ups and downs, the attempts to find the good, the painful awareness that breaks through as she discovers that being good and thoughtful is no match for a system that hid much of the awfulness of segregation of races, the demeaning of black Americans, the implication of worthlessness and greed and shiftlessness and ignorance of the targets of segregation.
There is much humanness here. The inartful simplicity of someone feeling vaguely discomforted at the knowledge that she and her family benefits from racialism. The polite engagements of black Americans when well-meaning white Americans ask them to “explain” how they were affected. The rage of white Americans being asked to dig up the past and talk about their part; the rage of black Americans asked to dig up the past and talk about their pain. It is what we humans do, I suppose, when we are confronted by the actions of society that sweep us along, either to bless us or bend us. We deserve so little of what we received, both for good and for ill, and we construct rationalizations to explain why we were cossetted and loved, or why we were rejected and maltreated. We are good, or we are bad. But of course, that is not true here, nor was it ever true. White children were blessed with good schools, and black children were deliberately assigned bad schools, and it was all done by choice, by design, by policy, by the combined will of people who all believed that white Americans were true Americans, and black Americans were on eternal probation. White Americans were taught their superiority in schools, in homes, and even in churches, and black Americans had to find solace in their own communities against a world that despised them.
This wasn’t the book I was expecting. I did not expect a memoir that feels like the reader is sitting on a porch swing with a frosty glass of lemonade, listening as the author proceeds to tell her story, but that is what this is – vignettes from the past and present, woven together to explain how so many good people could do so many wrong and hurtful things without realizing what they were doing in their actions.
This was well worth my time, and it helped me think about my own past, my own present, and the ability I have to choose my own future.
There are resonances of today’s social issues, of course, on how we are still trying to exclude some Americans from all of America’s liberties and blessings, but the author does not make any such statements directly; only someone who pays attention to the news and who knows of the past can see how the same arguments are used, every time, when we need to find reasons and methods to exclude Americans that don’t fit in.
All in all, a very good book.