The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence isn’t the one necessary anniversary in 2026. This yr additionally marks the seventy fifth anniversary of an peculiar case of scholar activism that helped result in the Very best Courtroom’s determination outlawing segregated colleges.
In April 1951, 16-year-old Barbara Rose Johns arranged a scholar strike to protest the shabby prerequisites and insufficient training at her segregated Black highschool in Prince Edward County, Virginia.
Prince Edward County is positioned about 65 miles southwest of Richmond and round 30 miles east of Appomattox, or 48 kilometers, in part of Virginia referred to as Southside. African American citizens constituted virtually part the inhabitants, however they had been in large part avoided from balloting ahead of passage of the Vote casting Rights Act in 1965 and may just no longer devour in native eating places ahead of passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The general public colleges had been segregated, and for many years there used to be no Black highschool in any respect.
In 1939, following years of drive via Black citizens, the white government opened a highschool for African American citizens. That segregated establishment used to be named for Robert Roosa Moton, who have been raised in Prince Edward County and served as an administrator at Hampton Institute in Virginia ahead of being appointed as the second one head of Tuskegee Institute following the loss of life of Booker T. Washington.
The brand new development was critically overcrowded virtually right away. Despite the fact that it used to be designed for a most enrollment of 180, attendance reached 219 the yr after it opened and 377 in 1947.
The next yr, the college board submit 3 transient outbuildings to deal with the overflow. Many Black citizens scorned those constructions as “tar paper shacks” as a result of their protecting and dilapidated situation. That they had inefficient wooden stoves that equipped restricted heating, and their skinny partitions steadily leaked when rain fell.
The shabbiness of those meantime constructions was a supply of continuous pressure, as negotiations between the Black neighborhood and white government for a extra everlasting facility dragged on inconclusively into early 1951.
This picture of scholars in a school room in Moton Top College used to be utilized in a lawsuit to exhibit unequal amenities within the segregated Virginia college district.
Nationwide Archives DOCSteach
Johns makes her transfer
As an eleventh grader at Moton Top College, Johns started speaking with a few of her fellow scholars about taking motion to protest the shacks and make stronger their training.
On April 23, 1951, any person lured Moton’s main, Boyd Jones, out of the development at the pretext that two scholars had been in hassle in different places on the town. After Jones left, Johns summoned the scholar frame to the auditorium, the place she exhorted her friends to stroll out to protest the deplorable situation in their college.
Johns additionally despatched a letter to Oliver W. Hill and Spottswood W. Robinson III, two Richmond civil rights attorneys who labored intently with the NAACP, asking for his or her prison help.
The strike went on for 2 weeks. All over that point, Hill and Robinson met two times with loads of scholars and oldsters. The conferences grew out of the attorneys’ preliminary skepticism about litigating over college prerequisites in rural Prince Edward County, the place they feared that plaintiffs can be matter to serious bodily and financial retaliation.
The ones conferences persuaded Hill and Robinson that the Black neighborhood widely supported an effort to acquire desegregation relatively than mere enhancements within the separate Black colleges. The attorneys due to this fact filed their lawsuit in the US District Courtroom for the Japanese District of Virginia on behalf of rankings of Black scholars and oldsters, alleging that segregated colleges violated the 14th Modification.
Victory – and messy historical past
Johns’ initiative had each short- and long-term penalties.
Within the instant aftermath of the strike, the all-white college board fired Jones, whom they thought to be having put the scholars as much as their activism regardless of his – and the scholars’ – insistence that the entire affair used to be a scholar initiative.
The lawsuit – and different identical fits filed in South Carolina, Delaware and Kansas – failed within the decrease court docket. The plaintiffs appealed to the Very best Courtroom, which reversed the ones judgments and dominated within the consolidated case known as Brown v. Board of Training that segregated public colleges had been unconstitutional.
The primary web page of the published reproduction of the Very best Courtroom’s desegregation determination in Brown v. Board of Training, Would possibly 17, 1954.
Smithsonian Nationwide Museum of American Historical past
In the meantime, within the wake of the scholar strike at Moton, Johns’ circle of relatives feared that she can be in bodily threat if she remained in Prince Edward County for her senior yr. They despatched her to reside together with her uncle Vernon Johns, a minister and outspoken civil rights suggest, in Bernard Law Montgomery, Alabama.
Johns graduated from Drexel College and labored for a few years as a public college librarian in Philadelphia ahead of her loss of life in 1991.
The post-Brown historical past of Prince Edward County may be very difficult. White government closed the general public colleges for 5 years to keep away from desegregation. For a very long time in a while, nearly the entire white kids went to a non-public academy that opened when the general public colleges closed.
However that messy historical past can not detract from the braveness and affect of Barbara Johns.
In December 2025, her statue changed that of Robert E. Lee as one of the most two Virginians displayed within the U.S. Capitol. Johns is there – along side George Washington.
