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 would be 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 serendipitous opportunity.

My two boys and I got in our car one Saturday morning and drove to their house/preschool 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. 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 proceeded to go well. As the U.S. national holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. approached, I started to feel an inclination to share a family story with my son's new preschol teacher. A year earlier around this time, my older son's class studied the civil rights movement and 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 be of interest to my younger son’s new preschool teacher. He had been a progressive educator his whole career.

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 decided to integrate. The decision drove away a few other families, but ultimately the integration persevered and the school recruited their first African-American teacher and students.

Something kept telling me to share this story with my son's new teacher, so I finally wrote an email. His response one day later was incredible! 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 likely 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 reached out to 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 even 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."