Photo: Mike Belleme 

Lillian Keys did something rare among her peers: She came back. After receiving her bachelor’s degree from Concord University in Athens, West Virginia, the 24-year-old English teacher returned home to Welch to teach at Mount View High School, from which she graduated in 2014. 

Keys is on the front line of an unusual strategy to restore promise to this corner of coal country, laid low by the long, inexorable decline of the mining industry upon which it built its fortune. A fourth- or fifth-generation native of the hollows of Appalachia, living in her grandparents’ former home, she embodies the idea of education as a bridge to a more promising future.

Photo: Branden Rodriguez

Jennifer Rocha, a recent graduate of the University of California, San Diego, decided to honor her parents by taking graduation photos in the farm fields where they worked to support her education. Her tribute has since gone viral.

"I wanted to take those pictures out there, specifically in the field, because that's what made me go to college," Rocha says. "That was my dad's lesson of saying, if you don't pursue a higher education, you're going to be working here the rest of your life."

For more than a century, the Virginia Theological Seminary relied on the forced labor of Black Americans. Now the seminary is sending annual cash payments of $2,100 to the descendants of those individuals. It's one of the first cash reparations programs in the country, and it's meant to recognize the Black people who worked on campus for little or no money during the time of slavery, reconstruction, and Jim Crow.

Ian Markham is president and dean of the seminary, and he proposed the reparations program. In this interview, he and a beneficiary of the effort, Gerald Wanzer, describe the significance of this moment.