Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County

Green grapples with her parents’ decision to send her and her brothers to Prince Edward Academy. She writes that she can better understand her grandparents’ decision to send their children to the school, as “they were products of their time” (207). But her parents’ background and evolving beliefs about race were different from her grandparents’.

As a young man, Chuck Green was eager to escape Farmville and his grandmother’s strict religiousness. He went to the University of Virginia and then to Virginia Medical College to become a dentist. While at the latter, he met Green’s mother, a student at the University of Richmond. They married in 1971, and both got jobs that increased their interactions with black people. Green’s father worked in a public housing complex, coaching mostly black kids in sports. He became fond of them and began to lose some of his prejudices. Her mother taught briefly at a school that was predominantly black. The couple then moved to Kentucky where Chuck Green served as an army dentist at Fort Campbell. It was there that he finally realized “that race and intelligence were not connected” (209). This came from working closely with an extremely capable black dentist. When that stint ended, Green’s parents chose to settle in Farmville.