Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County Summary

It took me a while to read this book. Every 15 pages or so, I would have to stop because I was so disgusted at what I read. Or shocked for lack of better word choice. It took time to digest; and sometimes I found myself looking up an event the author referenced because I had no clue what he was talking about especially being that this isn’t my history. Reading the stories of those people who were denied an education for five years was heartbreaking, not that education is cheap or anything but in this day and time everybody has access to it but not many actually want to pursue it. The author really brought these people's stories to life. Following the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, America’s public schools were instructed to work toward desegregation “with all deliberate speed”. However, in Prince Edward County, Virginia, the law was intentionally ignored through the …show more content…
Rather than desegregate, white leaders in the community gathered together to keep the county’s public schools closed for close to a decade and ran a private, segregated academy in their place.
Author Kristen Green writes Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County somewhat as a blend of her family’s history, the history of the town she grew up in, and a retelling of the events surrounding the creation of the county’s segregation academy. Though her efforts to set herself apart from her family’s history seem slightly overenthusiastic at times, Green is not afraid to ask important and necessary questions, both of herself and the people around her. I felt like the author spent a lot of time trying to convince the reader that she wasn’t racist. Perhaps 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 constantly repeated that she herself has full lips, I didn’t really know how to take