Something Must Be Done About Prince E..., Kristen Green
Something Must Be Done About Prince E..., Kristen Green
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Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County
A Family, a Virginia Town, a Civil Rights Battle

Author: Kristen Green

Narrator: Karen White

Unabridged: 10 hr 31 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 12/01/2020


Synopsis

In the wake of the Supreme Court's unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision, 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 in their all-white classrooms. Meanwhile, black parents had few options: keep their kids at home, move across county lines, or send them to live with relatives in other states. For five years, the schools remained closed.

Kristen Green, a longtime newspaper reporter, grew up in Farmville and attended Prince Edward Academy, which did not admit black students until 1986. In her journey to uncover what happened in her hometown before she was born, Green tells the stories of families divided by the school closures and of 1,700 black children denied an education. 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.

About Kristen Green

Kristen Green has worked as a reporter for the Boston Globe, San Diego Union-Tribune, and Richmond Times-Dispatch. She holds a master's degree in public administration from the Harvard Kennedy School. She is the author of Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County. Kristen lives in Richmond, Virginia.


Reviews

I liked this book. I felt like the author spent a lot of time trying to convince me that she wasn’t racist. Maybe it was because she felt guilty about the part her grandfather played in the closing of public schools. She kept reiterating that she has a brown husband and brown kids. She repeated that......more

Goodreads review by Alice

The story and history of this book is very much worth reading and learning about, but the authors presence in the story is overwhelming and the whole book sadly suffers very much for it.......more

Goodreads review by Maya

Journalist Kristen Green seems born to write this particular and personal history of Prince Edward County’s legendary segregationist resolve. Yet her book, Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County, reveals the many ways her family and community groomed her to do otherwise–to look the other......more