“Ken Woodley provides a powerful insider’s account of the struggle to establish Virginia’s Brown v. Board of Education Scholarship Program, an educational reparations program devoted to providing academic opportunities for those denied an education by their own elected officials during the Massive Resistance years. Probing the nature of reconciliation and the still-open wounds of racially motivated school closings, Woodley powerfully reminds readers that real apologies demand some form of tangible action, and that while the past cannot be changed, the present most certainly can.”
— Jill Ogline Titus, author of Brown’s Battleground: Students, Segregationists, and the Struggle for Justice in Prince Edward County, Virginia
“Talk about speaking truth to power! As the editor of a small-town, family-owned newspaper, Ken Woodley crusaded for decades to get his community to renounce its past devotion to segregation, a cause that had been championed by his paper. Driven by deep spirituality and tenacious resolve, Woodley not only succeeded, but convinced the Virginia legislature to pay reparations to the victims. The Road to Healing tells this remarkable story.”
— Donald P. Baker, Retired Washington Post journalist and author of Wilder: Hold Fast to Dreams, the biography of America’s first elected black governor
“As someone who was directly and indirectly affected by the shameful history in Prince Edward County, I truly believe God sent Ken Woodley as one of his shepherds to heal the racial divide and help us move towards reconciliation. The Road to Healing is a gripping account — candid and informed — of Woodley’s efforts to right a terrible wrong in the wake of what happened in Virginia in the years between 1951 and 1964. An emotional, powerful must-read!”
— Joan Johns Cobbs, sister of civil rights history-maker Barbara Rose Johns
“Some true stories surpass fiction in their ability to amaze, to inspire, and to impose symmetry on a chaotic world. Ken Woodley’s work to bring racial healing to Prince Edward County, Virginia, is one such story. That this small-town newspaper editor did so much good occupying a seat where so much destruction was once sown is a kind of miracle.”
— Margaret Edds, author of We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team that Dismantled Jim Crow
“Barbara Johns lit the lamp and Ken Woodley used it to light the way. His ultimate lesson is that you often do not cure the great ills of the world by grand gestures: you start small and in your own backyard.”
— Senator Mark Warner
“The Road to Healing shows the twists and turns and the slowly growing wisdom of a community turning from past to future. But the work is never done. And we so need examples to help us persevere in that work. Woodley gives us such an example.”
— Senator Tim Kaine
Ken Woodley 