In 1967, the first two black students were enrolled at an all-white private boarding school in Virginia. The main reason they were there? To benefit the white kids. This week: stories about being enlisted to benefit another person’s educational experience. A version of this story appears in The New York Times Magazine.
Photograph from Virginia Episcopal School
Prologue
How to Win Friends and Influence White People
Back in the late 1960s, a wealthy tobacco heiress saw that integration was happening all around the country—except at prep schools in the South. So she set out to find the best black students in neighborhood public schools—in hopes of teaching the white prep-school students to be less bigoted. Mosi Secret tells the story of how the first two black students to integrate Virginia Episcopal Academy succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. (26 minutes)
Act Two
Mosi Secret’s story continues. We find out about a black student who struggled at VES. And learn what, almost fifty years later, a white student makes of an experiment supposedly undertaken for his benefit. A version of Mosi’s story appears in The New York Times Magazine. (13 minutes)
Song:
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