The Road to Healing

This week’s other featured books, “The Second Mrs. Price,” by Toni Fuhrman and “Copper Magic,” by Julia Mary Gibson, can be found by scrolling down below this post, or by clicking the author’s name on our Author’s page.

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THE BOOK: The Road to Healing: A Civil Rights Reparations Story in Prince Edward County, Virginia

PUBLISHED IN: April, 2019

THE AUTHOR: Ken Woodley

THE EDITOR: Randall Williams

THE PUBLISHER: NewSouth Books, in Montgomery, Alabama

SUMMARY: In June of 1959, the Board of Supervisors in Prince Edward County, Virginia voted to de-fund public education as an act of “Massive Resistance” to the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954. In order to avoid integration, every public school was locked and “No Trespassing” signs were hammered into the school yards. Public schools remained closed for five long and catastrophic years. The vast majority of white students were educated by a private whites-only academy, using tuition grant funding from both the County of Prince Edward and the Commonwealth of Virginia. But more than 2,000 African American children in Prince Edward County were left without a formal education in their lives, a gaping wound that nobody had done anything about.

Until 2003-04. The Road to Healing is my first-person inside story of the crazy political twists and turns and inside-out moments required to create what the late Civil Rights icon, Julian Bond, told me became the first Civil Rights-era reparations in US history. I was able to convince the state legislature of Virginia to create The Brown v. Board of Education Scholarship Program and Fund to give back the educational opportunity that had been stolen during “Massive Resistance.” Those who had been locked out of school as children were able, in their 50s, to undertake the educational journey previously denied them—from high school general equivalency diplomas to community college and four-year university degrees and everything in between and beyond. The book begins in 1951 with the birth of the Civil Rights movement in Prince Edward County, Virginia and ends in the present day, deep in a journey of reconciliation that offers hope to the nation.

THE BACK STORY: When I graduated from Hampden-Sydney College, in Prince Edward County, in 1979, I’d never heard of “Massive Resistance.” I had no idea that schools had been closed. I had no idea that the newspaper at which I’d just been hired — The Farmville Herald— had led the fight to oppose integration and shut down public education entirely if necessary to avoid allowing white and black children to go to school together. I had no idea that the same family owned the newspaper. No idea that the same publisher/editorial writer was still in place. When I learned the truth, I felt that life had parachuted me behind enemy lines. Had I known the truth beforehand, I never would have crossed the threshold of that newspaper. But I ended up spending my entire 36-year journalism career in Prince Edward County at The Farmville Herald, becoming editor and using the editorial pulpit to reach out across the still-chasmic wounds created by “Massive Resistance” to try and bring the community together in a journey of healing and racial reconciliation. But, not content with words alone, I leveraged my position to directly engage local and state politicians to take steps necessary to repair the harm, and I became actively involved with them, an activist-journalist.

WHY THIS TITLE: Because it declares the truth about a journey of healing after one of the deepest wounds in U.S. history, a journey that is still underway on a road that awaits the footsteps and hearts of others, a road that all of America, and every American, might share, if we have the strength of heart and love enough to reach out to one another across the great divide of raace in this nation.

REVIEW COMMENTS:

“Because it is a story of hope. A story of redemption. A story of reconciliation. A story of muscular idealism. And because, thank God, it is a true story. A dramatic, edge-of-the-seat inspiring and inspiriting story of overcoming vast odds. When all appeared lost, victory was won. Not won for oneself but for those who had been desperately wounded as children by the post-nuclear wasteland of racist “Massive Resistance” in Virginia in the 1950s and 60s. But that is not all. The story also includes an entire community facing up to its racist past and, joining hands, moving forward. But “Massive Resistance” against racial justice and living colorblind in a loving society remains today in many hearts. The “civil wars” today are first fought within us. And so this is a story that resonates far beyond the borders of one state. It is a Civil Rights reparations story for America and our moment in time, a microcosm of what is possible for this nation to achieve.

AUTHOR PROFILE: Ken Woodley spent his entire 36-year career in journalism at The Farmville Herald in Prince Edward County, Virginia, the final 24 years as editor and editorial writer, while remaining news editor, columnist and reporter at the twice-weekly newspaper. He is a licensed lay preacher in the Episcopal Church and has written meditations for Forward Day By Day, the publishing arm of the Episcopal Church. But he considers himself a spiritual rather than a religious person and shies away from the rigidly dogmatic. He believes that God really is love. Not the emotion, but the thing itself. Woodley volunteers for an after-school program for at-risk children and is a primary care-giver for his 15-month-old granddaughter. He loves his wife, Kim, and his dog Pugsley. And music and books and hiking and….

AUTHOR COMMENTS: I believe we should live our lives as if it is our destiny to be precisely where we are. That mindset, that belief, that faith empowers us to look around and ask ourselves, “What really needs doing here?” and then go out and do it.

LOCAL OUTLETS: The book is available from virtually any local or online bookseller.

WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: amazon.com and bn.com

PRICE: $27.95

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: kenwoodley3@gmail.com