In the late 1960s, a small group of white philanthropists living in the American South quietly conducted an experiment that they hoped would change the character of the region. They recruited and paid for dozens of highly achieving black and brown boys and girls to racially integrate Southern boarding schools, then havens for elite white families and white people fleeing court-ordered integration. The question at the heart of their effort was novel: Could they make the children of white, Southern elites, who the philanthropists presumed were the future politicians, bankers and industrialists of the South, less bigoted by exposing them to black children? For 10 years, the group placed students of color in the schools, two or three at a time, tracking their progress and attempting to study their impact on their white peers. These stories, co-published as an episode of This American Life and a feature in The New York Times Magazine, explore this curious history at one of the desegregated boarding schools, Virginia Episcopal.