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When the public schools reopened, 1,600 black children came to class . . . and four whites. The private white schools flourished, eventually moving into handsome quarters upon 53 acres in Farmville, the county's commercial center. The public schools struggled along in a state of mediocrity, trying to repair the damage. Vanessa Venable remembers a 13-year-old girl standing at a blackboard. She was asked to add 34 and 26. She began to weep uncontrollably. She did not even know how to write a number. So she and Mrs. Venable stood at the blackboard for long minutes, crying hopelessly together.
In 1972 Prince Edward County's public schools had the lowest test scores in Virginia. But in the years since then, the public schools have made a gradual and remarkable recovery. Now Prince Edward County High School's student body is 62% black, 38% white. The tuition to attend the white private school (some 630 white students and six black) is now $2,495, and many white families have decided they can find a superior education (free) at the public schools. Even white families from surrounding counties are applying. Test scores for students in the public schools now approach the national average. The range of achievement remains stunningly wide: the high school has gifted students and functional illiterates. Prince Edward High's debating and forensics teams are state champions. The yearbook, slick, lively and professional, wins awards. Some students go to nearby Hampden-Sydney College and Longwood College for advanced courses. School Superintendent James M. Anderson Jr. and his teachers have accomplished an academic resurrection.
Prince Edward County never had racial violence, or the lynching meanness that seeped up in those years in Alabama and Mississippi. But the bruise of the past is deep. The students segregate themselves, black clusters and white clusters, in the school cafeteria. They struggle to describe the abiding significance of race in Prince Edward County. They cannot quite find the word for what they suspect in the hearts of the other race. Not "prejudice." Not "hatred," not "intolerance," exactly. It is, they say, something hidden, and always there.
In the county, whose population is roughly half white, half black, the vote last week was 2,821 for Douglas Wilder and 2,732 for Marshall Coleman. The mood after election day was strangely subdued. The election was too close. Blacks declined to celebrate. They seemed to fear that a recount might take the victory away.