A Debate Stage in Virginia, With Racial ‘Scar Tissue’ as the Backdrop

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/05/us/politics/farmville-virginia-debate.html

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FARMVILLE, Va. — When Tim Kaine joyously proclaimed that “Old Virginny is dead” the day after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, he was on to something. Virginia, the birthplace of American slavery and the state that provided the intellectual foundation more than 300 years later for “massive resistance” to integration, had just voted for a black man to go to the White House. But Virginia’s support for Mr. Obama that year was not an aberration.

Long seen as a hotbed of social unrest, where ancestor worship was as much a favored pastime as football, the Old Dominion reflects the America of 2016 as much as any state in the country.

Mr. Kaine, who was Virginia’s governor in 2008 and is now a senator and the Democratic nominee for vice president, will debate Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, on Tuesday night in a state that is increasingly suburban, racially diverse and culturally tolerant.

“I bet we’ve got more scar tissue than any other state on this,” Mr. Kaine said in an interview, referring to issues of race. “But we have learned that the better path is the path that Jefferson announced at the very beginning, that equality is our North Star, and when we follow that and we progressively get closer and closer to it.”

Mr. Kaine, like Virginia’s other senator and its governor, is a transplant.

I am not.

Though I grew up in Northern Virginia, still seen by some die-hards as occupied territory, the debate in Farmville, in the central part of the state, represents something of a homecoming for me. I went to college a few minutes down the road from Longwood University, the debate host, at Hampden-Sydney, a tradition-bound and still all-male school founded in 1776.

It is fair to say I was not expecting the 2016 presidential race to go through the rural community where I had spent four years. When I heard that Farmvegas, as we used to call it, had been awarded the debate, I was thrilled. Not only would it be fun to cover a debate in a small town I knew so well, but the event would shine a light on a place that, unbeknown to many, was home to one of the most uplifting stories, and then one of the most tragic stories, in civil rights history. And if ever there was a campaign that needed historical perspective on race in America, it was this one.

It was in Farmville that Barbara Johns, a 16-year-old African-American girl, led a walkout from the community’s dilapidated all-black school in 1951 to protest the inferior conditions. The protest, an astonishing display of physical courage in the Jim Crow South, ultimately led to a lawsuit that was merged with the cases collectively known as Brown v. Board of Education.

Sadly, the integration story of Farmville, and the surrounding Prince Edward County, does not end there. In defiance of the Supreme Court, local white officials would eventually close the entire county’s public school system for five years rather than let black and white children learn together. An all-white academy was built, and African-Americans and some poor white students were denied an education. Many of them still live in the area, and some have benefited from a state program offering tuition assistance for those who had no place to go to school during this period.

“This isn’t the past,” said Mr. Kaine, who in 2008 unveiled a civil rights monument honoring Ms. Johns and others outside Virginia’s Capitol. “It still has a very significant effect.”

He would know: He married the daughter of Linwood Holton, Virginia’s first racially progressive governor.

“When my father-in-law integrated the public schools in Virginia, he became persona non grata politically ever after,” Mr. Kaine said, “and it’s only now, at 93, people think he was a good governor.”

This community, like the state, has made considerable strides. A black woman is now the county prosecutor, and there is a civil rights museum where that segregated school stood. But the racial divide on education has not yet been bridged. The all-white academy is renamed and includes some blacks, but it is largely white while the public schools are mostly black.

Longwood’s public relations effort in the lead-up to the debate focused on Farmville as a place of reconciliation, highlighting the symmetry of the Civil War’s end in nearby Appomattox and, less than 100 years later, Ms. Johns’s walkout that helped fuel the civil rights movement here. Some natives would prefer more attention to the school closures and the bitter legacy they left.

“I think it’s a missed opportunity,” said Kristen Green, who grew up in Farmville and returned recently to write a book, “Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County,” an account of the education struggle here and how the community is and is not reckoning with its history.

W. Taylor Reveley IV, Longwood’s president, said a civil rights walking tour planned for Tuesday would include talk of the school closures, and he pointed to a discussion of the topic in the press materials. Farmville, Mr. Reveley said, is now “genuinely drawing strength from its history rather than avoiding its history.”

But he conceded that the town was still grappling with difficulties in educational opportunities and outcomes. In this regard, he said, Farmville is not unique.

It is a reflection of the country.

“There’s no place in the United States that has achieved a perfect state of grace when it comes to these issues,” he said.