Professor Twitty J. Styles, PhD, guides his readers first-hand through his role in a profoundly important event in American history – the Brown v. Board of Education case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ended the “separate but equal” doctrine in American public schools. Dr. Styles was in on the ground floor of that victory, centered in part in the very county in Virginia in which he will always see himself “a son,” a rooted and affectionate native.
The Robert Russa Moton school opened in the 1930s, offering the first formal public post-elementary education of any sort for black children in and around Farmville, Prince Edward County, Va. Styles graduated from Moton in 1944. Although the building itself accommodated 150 students, three times as many attended. Overflow classes were held in tar-paper shacks and even in a junked school bus out behind the school, all without heat and toilets.
Upon his graduation Styles attended Virginia Union University, one of the group of historically black colleges and universities, majoring in biology. From there, in 1949, he returned to Farmville as a science teacher at Moton.
But the Korean War interrupted that. Styles was drafted into the Army and so was gone in 1951 when some former students of his were among the organizers of a strike against the poor conditions at Moton. They also brought suit against the school board with the assistance of the NAACP, and that legal action, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, became part of the Brown v. Board of Education case decided in the Supreme Court in 1954.
Upon his return from military service, Styles headed into the doctoral program in parasitology at NYU, a specialty stemming from his wartime training and one that would shape the rest of his long and distinguished career. Meanwhile important events continued in Prince Edward County involving the struggle for equal opportunity in education. The white segregationist power structure shut down all public education in Virginia to avoid the integration required by Brown v. Board. From 1959 to 1964 students of color could only find education in ad-hoc arrangements or relocate north.
Integrated public K-12 education finally arrived in 1964. Styles relates the details of this grueling but vital struggle in which his hometown and alma mater were major theaters. Readers are left no doubt that he feels every stage down to his core. Though his life’s path led him away from Prince Edward County into the military, graduate study, post-doctoral work in Mexico and finally a faculty position and career at Union College, his heart, the book makes plain, was with the people from his hometown whom he’d grown up knowing and teaching.
Yet nothing remotely like guilt for being physically absent from Virginia enters his thinking here. Instead he wonders what his life would have been like had he remained in Farmville. He is too wise to be plagued with regrets: “The course of a person’s life journey is part fate, part luck, and partly in the hand of God guiding us along the way.”
And guided he was, into higher education for himself but always with the purpose of educating others. Styles’s passion for teaching is patently clear. Student episodes abound – readers will recognize a master teacher in many settings.
It is not surprising that the teacher is himself a lifelong learner. Since his retirement, the “catalog” of courses Styles has audited and terms abroad he has undertaken, many outside his scientific comfort zone, could stand as a world record for emeriti professors.
The threads found woven through this autobiography are many. There are several memorable travel accounts, since a professional parasitologist must trek to the locales of exotic organisms to do research. Styles’s family history also holds our interest, striding as it does across multiple worlds and origins. And always people are prominent – fellow scholars, childhood friends, students taught and mentored, military brethren – and all are equally cherished, though above all are his wife, children and grandson.
Sadly but predictably, Styles has personally been subjected to racism and discrimination. Besides slights of the well-known variety, certain other episodes reveal this ugliness unexpectedly. His sister contracted TB through domestic employment in a white Farmville dentist’s home because the woman of the house was a consumptive. No one thought or cared to warn or protect Styles’s sister from exposure, as she was “the help.” In another instance, a friend of Styles, a naval officer, was arrested for impersonating an officer when he was, in fact, exactly that. The grounds given by the military police were that “there are no black officers.”
To Styles, all such insults and hurt stem from ignorance. He credits his father with handing down to him a belief in the “clarion call” of education. Dr. Twitty Styles’s guiding principle is always “commitment to teaching (others) the skills that foster communication, understanding, and acceptance of individuals with different ethnic backgrounds or religions from their own.” He has based his life on it.
Who should buy and read Son of Prince Edward County? Anyone and everyone. And every bookstore and library, from specialized to academic to general public, should stock it for any reader seeking a well-written life about a life well-lived, set amidst a time and place of critical change in American history.
(David R. Gerhan is a Professor Emeritus at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y.)