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seen in costume.” His nickname while in office was “the fighting bachelor.” His only marriage, at the age of fifty-two, lasted little more than eighteen months. For reasons that “remain uncertain,” he insistedthat the marriage never be made public. His wife never “lived in the Vestavia temple.” They never “had any children.” When he died he “left everything to his nieces.” And the “faithful retainers” on his staff were strapping young black men. Ward nicknamed them Lucullus, Pompey, and Scipio. On special occasions, he liked to dress them up in Roman centurion uniforms.
    We’re all on the same page here, right?
    Vestavia Hills didn’t start as a refuge of wholesome, middle-class family values. It was a refuge
from
wholesome, middle-class family values—a place apart from the religious and racial intolerance dividing the city below. That would not last. The Great Depression left Ward penniless. He suffered a debilitating stroke, lingered for years, and died of throat cancer in 1940, his gardens choked with weeds and his temple nearly in ruins.
    In 1947, a real estate developer named Charles Byrd bought the abandoned estate and much of the surrounding land. Starter homes began sprouting up—homes proudly advertised as “fully restricted.” From now on, the only people of color allowed in Vestavia’s gardens would be the ones who were planting them. Officially incorporated on November 8, 1950, the city of Vestavia Hills took the landmark mansion as its namesake, but by that time the rugged wilderness where Native Americans and sexually ambiguous politicians once roamed free had ceased to exist.
    And the Vestavia temple itself? In 1958, George Ward’s stately pleasure dome was turned into a Baptist church.

    Other than George Ward, the man probably most responsible for the future success of Vestavia was Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, who in 1954 handed down the decision of
Brown v. Board
, which sent white people running for the hills.
    Less than two months after
Brown
was announced, Indianola, Mississippi, formed what would be the first of many White Citizens’ Councils, groups of civic and business leaders who used their power and influence to thwart any attempts to implement the court’s decision. In Louisiana, when the archbishop of New Orleans announced that the CatholicChurch would follow the spirit of the court order and integrate its parochial schools, the legislature convened in Baton Rouge to debate whether or not police power could be used to bring the church under state control. In Virginia, Senator Harry Byrd called for a campaign of “massive resistance” against
Brown.
The state enacted a sweeping program of obstructionist legislation, defunding schools that attempted to integrate and providing vouchers and tax credits for white families to enroll in private, all-white “segregation academies.” Similar legal challenges across the South would clog up the courts for years.
    And that’s just the stonewalling that went on during the daytime. Under the cover of darkness, the Ku Klux Klan and other groups waged campaigns of murder and intimidation to keep blacks on their side of the color line. The combined effort of legal obstructionism and extralegal terrorism made for an effective deterrent. By the early 1960s, less than 12 percent of schools in the South had integrated; in the Deep South, the figure was as low as 2 percent. In Virginia, Prince Edward County shuttered its entire public school system for five years rather than integrate. At the rate things were going, one activist estimated, the South was on track to be in compliance with
Brown
in about seven thousand years.
    At the time, the white residents of Birmingham enjoyed one of the finest school systems anywhere in the South. Its flagship high schools—Woodlawn, Ramsay, Phillips, West End—were grand and imposing, built by a city with great pride in its public works. No black student had ever set foot in any