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The forty-one-year-old Reed signed on as principal in 2010. He grew up in Farmville and graduated from Prince Edward County High School, and working to improve his alma mater appealed to him. When Reed interviewed for the job, school district administrators told him that the school had enrolled in the turnaround program. Reed questioned whether he wanted to be in the tightly regulated environment but told himself he would develop a new skill set.

Reed seems the ideal principal for this failing school. He’s black, like most of the students. He understands Prince Edward and its history, but his parents weren’t directly affected by the school closures. Reed is also a county success story, having earned a bachelor’s degree at Hampton University and a master’s degree in education leadership from the College of William & Mary, where he is currently pursuing a doctorate. He previously worked as a teacher and as an assistant principal at schools around the state.

He also has a presence. He is short and sturdy, with a shaved head and a clean-shaven face. He comes across as confident and bold, unconstrained by old ideas of how blacks should act in Farmville. He rented a house on First Avenue with his wife and stepdaughter, becoming the first black family to live on my parents’ block. At school, he speaks frankly. He reaches out to students to explain why they must perform better and why it’s important for them to graduate. “We’re not an agrarian society anymore,” he tells students and their parents. “You can’t just be a farmer. You need a high school degree to do something with your life.”

He isn’t the disciplinarian some people think the high school needs. Instead, his priority is transforming Prince Edward County High School into one of the highest-performing schools in the state. He wants the teachers and students to believe they can do it, too. He is trying to focus the attention on academics and ignore other distractions.

The high school presents plenty of challenges for Reed. More than half the students live in poverty; 58 percent are receiving free and reduced lunches. Many of the students are being raised by a single parent or by grandparents, and they need more support to thrive in school. Soon after his arrival, Reed quickly identified two more problems—teachers who felt helpless, and students who weren’t hungry to learn.

The two-story brick building is the same school that was built to appease black students in the 1950s after the strike at Moton High School. Upgrades have been made through the years and new sections have been added, but it feels worn-down. To make the school seem more welcoming, Reed and his father spent a weekend repainting the entryway and clearing out glass trophy cases filled with mementos of decades past. Word spread among black county residents that Reed was dismissing the school’s history, but he simply wanted to focus his students on learning, not on the county’s troubled past. “That’s a burden our community carries,” Reed tells me. “That’s not a burden for our kids.”

Reed homes in on his primary objective: bringing an academic focus to the school attended by nearly seven hundred children. He wants it to reach its academic benchmarks and to develop a reputation as a great school. And he has a partner to help him do it—Cambridge Education, a consultancy that helps school districts around the nation improve students’ performance.

To ensure students get the rigorous and engaging instruction they deserve, he and other administrators spend the bulk of their days in the classroom, observing teachers and providing feedback about instruction. He stands in the hallways, greeting students as they change classes, then pops into classrooms, typing up notes as he watches teachers and students interact. By the end of the day, he e-mails teachers his critiques. Instructors work one-on-one in the classroom with some teachers. Teacher turnover, already high in this rural community, has increased because some teachers can’t meet the new standards or don’t want to try. But other teachers have embraced the hands-on instruction from Cambridge and are taking more pride in their work.

Reed is also attacking the low graduation rate, a priority for the state. He created a graduation wall in the conference room, pinning photos and short biographies of each of the seniors on a bulletin board, grouping them into categories based on their readiness to graduate. The list includes students on track to graduate with an advanced degree, a regular degree, or a special education diploma. There is also a “danger” category for students not on track to graduate, a label that fit nearly one-quarter of the senior class when Reed arrived. “Those are the learners you want to focus on because those are the ones that need the most help,” he tells me.

He has established a team of teachers, administrators, and guidance counselors who meet on Monday mornings to identify ways to help these children graduate. Most need to pass a required standardized test or an elective class. Over the year, Reed, other administrators, and teachers seek parents’ help encouraging at-risk students to meet the graduation requirements. Reed suggests that a student who needs help to pass a state-required test come in before or after school to work with a teacher, and he asks students to sign a contract agreeing to work harder. He has even brought students’ preachers on board.

Reed takes a mathematical approach to improving the school’s test pass rate, attempting to predict which students may not pass. He tests students every six weeks and then crunches the data. He requires at-risk students to work more closely with teachers or enrolls them in an algebra camp where they are drilled in the basics.

Using these tools, his team has boosted the school’s standardized test scores. In a three-year period, his team has cut the number of students who do not graduate by more than half. After the final year of the turnaround program, 87 percent of seniors will earn a diploma.

But, on graduation day, Reed will be packing up to leave the job at his alma mater. His success in Prince Edward has caught the attention of a Norfolk middle school, and he is ready to try to replicate what he’s done at another turnaround school. Without Reed, parents and teachers wonder if the high school can maintain the momentum.

THE NOTION THAT PRINCE EDWARD County High School could become one of the best schools in the state seemed implausible, given its history and given the current state of the schools. Yet Virginia’s education department considers the changes that occurred during Reed’s three-year tenure to be remarkable. Of the twenty-five high schools in the state’s turnaround program, Prince Edward County High School made the most gains. Kathleen Smith, the director of the Office of School Improvement at the Virginia Department of Education, told me the county embraced the state’s mandate to increase the graduation rate. “Prince Edward has historically not cared one way or the other if a black student graduated from high school,” she told me, “and now they are caring.

“High schools are not easy to change,” she added. “That school has come a long way.”

But despite the long hours put in by teachers, and despite the academic success the school has seen as a result of that work, Reed still sees a persistent belief in the community that the public schools can’t achieve academically.

“There is the expectation—more of an expectation here than in other places—for the school to fail,” Reed confides. It’s even worse than that, he says. “It’s almost like we have a population … of parents that, for whatever reason, want to see this school fail because of what happened then,” he tells me.

They aren’t persuaded by data showing the improvements the school has made, and they aren’t moved by praise from the state Department of Education, Reed says.

I wonder if parents aren’t able to see changes because of their limited involvement in the school. Few turn out for parent-teacher conferences. Maybe the lack of parental engagement, typical at the high school level, is exacerbated by the school closings.

“They’ve been taught their entire life that going to a council meeting and being an advocate … is not a good idea, you’ll get in trouble,” Kathleen Smith reminded me. “They have a natural fear of those kinds of things.”

Maybe parents don’t value education because either they or their parents were denied the chance to attend school. Or maybe there’s simply lingering resentment.

“We All Wish It Hadn’t Happened”

I slide back into a cold wooden booth at First Baptist Church. It is the fiftieth anniversary of the black students’ 1963 march from this church down Main Street to the white Farmville Baptist Church. The black students tried to join the white church’s worship service and were blocked at the door. The students knelt and prayed and sang on the steps, where they were arrested for disrupting a church service.

This time, in 2013, will be different. This time, black county residents have been invited inside the same churches that once turned them away. This time, the police force that decades earlier arrested twenty-three people will recognize them for their bravery. This time, a sea of white people sits inside the historic black church. Diane Stubbins, the Fuqua English teacher, is here with her daughter. I see Farmville city councilwoman Sally B. Thompson and her husband, the Reverend William E. Thompson, a historian. Patsy Watson, a member of Farmville Baptist Church whose children attended Fuqua School, is here. Donna Peery Andrews, the widow of Bush League leader Lester Andrews, is here. Dozens more whites affiliated with the churches and the universities have already been seated.

As I look around the church, I realize that I’ve interviewed many of the black people in the sanctuary. Doug and JoAnn Vaughan. Ricky Brown and Shirby Scott Brown. Everett Berryman. Farmville vice mayor A. D. “Chuckie” Reid. Lacy Ward Jr. and Justin Reid from the Moton Museum. Lacy’s father, Lacy Ward Sr., a former county supervisor. James Ghee. The church’s pastor, the Reverend James Ashton. Elsie is seated in the front with some of her friends from the choir.

The Reverend J. Samuel Williams, one of the strike’s leaders, addresses the congregation, noting how much things have changed since he was arrested. A year earlier, the leadership of the church that denied him entrance asked him to read the scripture there, and later, to preach.

A. Q. “Andy” Ellington, a lieutenant with the Farmville Police Department and a graduate of Prince Edward Academy, tells the congregation that he got goose bumps looking at photographs taken in 1963 of Farmville police officers preparing to arrest protestors, whom he referred to as “unsung local civil rights heroes.”

“Because of these students, we are a reconciled and united community that I’m proud to be a part of,” Ellington tells the crowd. I wait for him to go further, to say that his department shouldn’t have arrested the students, to make some sort of apology, but he doesn’t. Still, it feels like an important step to have a representative of the police department speak at all, to acknowledge what the officers did that day and to recognize the contributions of the students they arrested.

Williams asks the crowd to sing the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome.” As I stand to join in, I visualize him leading students in the protest song five decades earlier, on the steps of my grandparents’ church. I wipe tears on the sleeve of my jacket, coarse against my cheek. My faith in this community is renewed watching white churches welcome the very people they once excluded. If some members of the black community are willing to walk through doors that had been closed to them, that’s progress. If the town’s biggest employer, Centra Southside Hospital, donates water for the event, and the town of Farmville provides a bus to transport elderly people from church to church, maybe there is hope yet.

I walk with the congregation down the sidewalk to Farmville Baptist Church, following Williams and the former student protestor Tina Land on the same path they took five decades earlier. The group also visits the Farmville Methodist Church and Johns Memorial Episcopal Church, where the church vestry, without fanfare, extends a public apology for participation “in the complex webs of racism that gripped this community fifty years ago and since.”

“Insofar as our brothers and sisters, especially our African American brothers and sisters, were harmed educationally, socially, and spiritually,” a church member reads, “we wish to say that we are sorry and ask pardon although we recognize that no pardon is deserved.”

THE NEXT DAY, A HANDFUL of people, most of them black, turn out for the Monday brown bag lunch at the Moton Museum. After watching a movie about Bobby Kennedy, they are talking about the previous day’s anniversary of the kneelin and considering why more black residents didn’t participate. Some point out that whites attended in higher numbers, bringing their children along. “It was twice as many of them as there were of us,” one woman says.

“Our children should have been there,” says Mary Reed, a retired reading specialist at the public schools and the mother of the high school’s outgoing principal, Craig Reed.

They agree that blacks need to teach their children Prince Edward’s story. “We have to blame ourselves,” Mary Reed tells the group, which includes me and one other white person. “We don’t know our history.”

The museum director’s father, Lacy Ward Sr., tells the people assembled that he believes the Prince Edward story is one of the most exciting pieces of American history, in part because the struggle of a group of young people against discrimination resulted in a Supreme Court ruling. He says that he doesn’t understand why more residents aren’t engaged in learning the history. “The people here, it doesn’t move them, it seems,” Ward Sr. said, sounding sad and resigned.

Mickie Pride, who lost four years of education, suggests that apathy among black residents is a direct result of the education denied them. She wonders how to reach the large segment of the community that hasn’t set foot in the museum and doesn’t attend the school reunions she helps to organize. She thinks it’s important for black residents in particular to face the past, as she has, but she’s not sure how to connect with people who don’t want to be reached, to tell them about what the museum is doing, to encourage them to attend the Moton reunions.