Having grown up in an affluent white area of New York, Ramona Battle of Lynchburg remembers the “unspoken” view of educators in her public school that black students would not advance to college. Her father, a World War II veteran and the first in his family to attend college, would not stand for that. When she was a teenager, Martin Luther King, Jr. came to speak with her activist father’s group about peacefully protesting – she was so in awe she could only utter a few words to him. Ramona’s story was one of many collected during a “School Desegregation: Learn, Preserve, and Empower” oral history event at the Lynchburg Public Library. A crowd of about 50 people gathered, many to go on the record about their own experiences with desegregation of public schools and to show photographs or documents bearing witness to the social change. For full story click here.