71 Years Later, A Fated Encounter

When my youngest son was three years old, I received an invitation from a husband and wife acquaintence, who run a preschool out of their home, to visit and see if their school was a good fit for my son. They were parents of a classmate of my older son, who was already in Elementary School, and we had been introduced earlier that year. Given that my three-year-old was not yet in preschool, and they had recently opened their school and were recruiting students, this seemed like a fortuitous opportunity.

My two boys and I got in our car one Saturday morning and drove to their house in a nearby neighborhood of Los Angeles. When we pulled up, their 6 year-old daughter was peering out from their front window, waiting for us to arrive. Their preschool is play-based, and my boys had fun playing with the school's toys and equipment, and having a simultaneous playdate with their daughter. I enrolled my youngest son two months later. 

Everything was going well. It was January, and the U.S. national holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. was approaching. A year earlier around this time, while my older son was studying the civil rights movement in school, he had shared with his kindergarten class that his great-grandmother had been a teacher at the first school to integrate in Virginia. The story had piqued so much interest from his teachers that they invited me to share the history with his class. As MLK Jr. Day approached again, I wondered if this story would interest my younger son’s new preschool teacher. He had been a progressive educator for his whole career, and the school where my grandmother had taught was a progressive school itself.

The school, Burgundy Farm Country Day School in Alexandria, Virginia, integrated four years before the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case had outlawed school segregation. It was founded in 1946 by a group of 12 concerned families who wanted an alternative education for their children. It did not start as an integrated school, but four years later, in 1950, many of the founding families wanted to integrate. It drove away a few other families, but ultimately the decision to integrate persevered and they recruited their first African-American teacher and students.

I shared this story with my son's new preschool teacher over email, explaining that I thought he might be interested to hear about this piece of history. The response that he sent me one day later was shocking. He said that he was the grandson of a founding family of Burgundy Farm Country Day School. His father and uncle were two of its first students. As we did the math, we realized that my father and his father had attended the school at the same time, and that my grandmother could have been one of their teachers. The chance of us meeting seventy-one years later, in Los Angeles, on the other side of the country, was remarkable.

The founders of Burgundy Farm had the vision to offer children “peace from fear—and an opportunity to develop courage and hope about themselves.” As the Washington Post reported at the 50 year anniversary of the school's integration, the students and faculty of color who had attended at that time remember it fondly. One student remembers "A whole live-and-let-live feeling permeated the place."

I never had a chance to ask my father about his time at Burgundy Farm before he passed away over twenty years ago, however, from my mother's accounts, he always spoke fondly of it too. During my preparation to speak to my son's kindergarten class, I had called my aunt and asked her about her memories. She shared a story that in Alexandria at that time, the public swimming pool was segregated, and on hot days, my grandmother would invite all the kids back to their house to cool off in the sprinklers on their front lawn.

As one of the founding parents of Burgundy Farm is quoted to have said about the integration, "We integrated that little school, not as a challenge to anybody, not as a precedent, just because it seemed a good thing to do, on behalf of our own children, who must learn to live, after all, in a country that doesn’t belong to any particular group."

I never met my grandmother, but I've heard that she was a charasmatic and brilliant woman. She grew up in Brooklyn, New York to Polish and Russian parents and later attended Cornell University at age 16, which is where she met my grandfather. They moved to the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. because my grandfather was offered a teaching position at George Washington University. My grandmother was very active in the Democratic Party, which is how she had been offered the teaching position at Burgundy Farm.

As my son's preschool teacher and I shared stories about our families, we discovered a similarity in some of our family members who had attended Burgundy Farm. As adults, they had chosen to live simple and off-the-grid lifestyles. Perhaps this safe haven of a school, set on 26-acres of partially wooded land, instilled in them a yearning for peace and a skillset for self-reliance.

Today, Burgandy Farm is thriving. It operates on the same 26-acre campus where the first school building was converted from a dairy barn. The school's mission nurtures "an appreciation for human diversity" and is guided by the belief that "we are inherently connected to all people and the world around us."