The Ambassador

Kevin Sieff: FARMVILLE, Va. — Nearly 50 years after it opened as a sanctuary for white students in a county that resisted school desegregation to the very end, the Fuqua School wanted badly to prove its racist days were over.

The private school in this town on the banks of the Appomattox River accepted its first black student in the late 1980s. But the black community here still knew Fuqua as central Virginia's most famous "segregation academy."

It was still viewed, well into the 21st century, as a symbol of defiance to the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. It was still seen as a place where black students…