'The Road to Healing' with Ken Woodley

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. The Road to Healing: A Civil Rights Reparations Story 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 is about what it has to share about a way into our future.

About Ken Woodley
Ken Woodley was the editor for twenty-four years of the Farmville Herald in Prince Edward County, Virginia. When he went to work at the family-owned newspaper twelve years earlier, he did not know its segregation-boosting history in the 1950s and 1960s. The paper was still owned by the same family, with the same publisher/editorial writer in place. Rather than leave, Woodley chose to spend his entire career there, lending his voice to racial healing and reconciliation. Woodley is a licensed lay preacher in the Episcopal Church and has published daily spiritual meditations Forward Day By Day.

Co-presented with the Prince George's County Human Relations Commission.