From 1959 to 1964, approximately 1,700 Black children in Prince Edward County, Virginia were denied schooling, due to the county leaders' decision to close schools--a defiant response to federal racial desegregation mandates stemming from "Brown v. Board of Education" (1954, 1955). Yet from one of the most extreme cases of injustice in the history of American public schools emerged a remarkable example of resilience in education. Some descendants of the lockout persisted toward the completion of doctoral degrees in spite of their parents' experiences. This study sought an in-depth understanding of how and why these particular children developed academic resilience despite the adversity of having parents denied a complete public school education. This interpretivist phenomenological study drew upon the Systems Theory of Family Resilience (Walsh, 1998) to understand the processes that developed the eight participants' resilience. The data generated with these participants were analyzed to explain the nature of their resilience, and how it was developed during their childhoods within the family. The participants' families demonstrated resilience-building processes within four domains: organizational patterns, beliefs and expectations, emotional welfare, and learning opportunities. The first three domains matched elements of Walsh's resilience theory well. Processes within the learning opportunities domain, however, were prominent in the participants' experiences, but latent in Walsh's theory. Absent from the theory was the process of racial socialization, during which African American parents prepare their children for encounters with racism. This process includes cultivating racial pride, an aspect that was important to the participants' resilience development. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]