The Road To Healing

Ken Woodley here. I don’t know if this qualifies as a shameless plug—I know that I do it without shame—but I want to share with everyone that my book, The Road to Healing, will be published later this month and can be pre-ordered right this very moment through your favorite local or online retailer. It is available online through amazon.com and bn.com (Barnes and Noble). The book is being published by NewSouth Books of Montgomery, Alabama (and is no vanity press volume).
The book’s subtitle is: A Civil Rights Reparations Story in Prince Edward County, Virginia.
I believe those who have enjoyed sharing this journey together will also enjoy the book. The Holy Spirit, God and Jesus are deep within it because The Road to Healing was, and is, a journey of faith.
The story is true and provides inspiration and hope for a divided nation and world. The centerpiece of the book is my first-person account of the tumultuously twisting and turning effort to create what the late Julian Bond told me would become the first Civil Rights-era reparations in U.S. history.
Those who read, and recall, my writings in January of 2018 in Forward Day By Day will remember that about a half a dozen of them were about the “massive resistance” in Prince Edward County, Virginia to the Brown v. Board decision of 1954. The County shut down its entire public school system for five years—1959 to 1964—rather than integrate schools. More than 2,000 African American children were left without a formal education. The wound was deep.
The book tells the story of our efforts to bring healing to that unprecedented wound of race. In telling Prince Edward County’s story from 1951, and the birth of the Civil Rights movement there, to the present day, the arc of the narrative is one of ongoing healing and reconciliation.
The story marks a trail blaze for other communities, the nation and world to follow.
U.S. Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine—both former Virginia governors, with Kaine also once a candidate for vice-president—wrote the Foreword and Afterword, respectively.
God’s love, peace and grace to you,
Ken Woodley