The year is 1967. The Summer of Love. The Vietnam War. Riots across American inner cities. In the American South, the hard-fought battles for school integration finally reach the last bastion of white scholastic privilege: the region’s elite prep schools. Two African-American boys enter Virginia Episcopal School in Lynchburg, a school on the site of a former slave plantation. An heiress of North Carolina’s tobacco barons provided the political will. A progressive Headmaster fought for inclusion and soon sacrificed his job for it. The experiment was on its course. For the next four years straight, V.E.S. students and their parents watched as the two African American boys commanded academic rankings as #1 and #2 in their class. Bill Alexander and Marvin Barnard became champions of the school and, by the time they graduated, leaders of a cohort of young African American men known at the Magnificent Seven.
