Pictures at the Protest by Steven K. Smith

In 1959, the Prince Edward County, Virginia, public schools closed for five years.

Back then, it wasn’t over a health pandemic, but because county leaders refused to desegregate white and Black schools. So when long-hidden photographs surface from the student protests along Main Street in Farmville, Sam, Derek, and Caitlin are on the case to help identify the brave teenagers who stood for justice nearly sixty years ago.

Their search winds through Virginia’s checkered racial past of Jim Crow and Massive Resistance, sending them to key sites like the Moton Museum, Evergreen Cemetery, Jackson Ward, and the Virginia State Capitol, and courageous voices like Barbara Johns, Oliver Hill, and Maggie Walker. But when protests over Confederate monuments and cries for social justice ignite their city, will the kids use their lessons from history to take a stand in the present? How far will they go to support new friends while confronting faces from the past?