She asked trusted classmates for help with a secret plan. On April 23, 1951, they lured Principal M. Boyd Jones out of the building with a false story and then sent teachers a note about an assembly. More than 400 students crowded into the too-small auditorium. To everyone’s surprise, the teachers were asked to leave and Barbara took the stage.
Usually quiet and cheerful, Barbara was now fierce. She told students it was time to challenge injustice. That if they stuck together, they could make a difference. Students cheered. When Barbara asked them to strike with her — or leave the building and refuse to attend school — they all did.
Nothing like it had ever happened in Prince Edward County or anywhere else. Cainan Townsend is director of education at the Moton Museum. Cainan says that several years before Rosa Parks, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and others became civil rights leaders, Barbara Johns led her fellow students to demand equality.
With help from the NAACP (a civil rights organization), the Moton strikers sued Prince Edward County, demanding desegregation. While their lawsuit went to court, they went back to class. However, Barbara faced threats because of the strike and spent her senior year with relatives in Alabama.
The lawsuit continued all the way to the United States Supreme Court as one of five cases combined into Brown v. Board of Education. Townsend says that the Prince Edward case was the only one started by students. The court ruled in 1954 that racial segregation in public schools violated the U.S. Constitution and must end. But the struggle wasn’t over.
White officials in Prince Edward refused to desegregate. The county’s Black families continued the battle in court. When the court insisted that the county desegregate in 1959, officials closed the county’s public schools — for five years. Most White children went to private school. Black children and some White children had no education until 1964, when newly desegregated schools reopened.
For years afterward, no one talked publicly about the strike or closings. But many people who grew up at that time had what Townsend calls “unfinished business.” Eventually Black and White residents of Prince Edward came together to discuss their past and move forward.
Today state-sponsored scholarships help long-ago “locked-out” students continue their education, a memorial stands on the state Capitol grounds in Richmond and the old Moton high school is a museum.
Barbara Johns demonstrated the strength of one voice. She understood the power even young people have when they stand together. Soon a statue will honor Barbara and represent Virginia at the United States Capitol. In Barbara’s words, “All I had to do — was do it.”
The Moton Museum offers information on Barbara Johns and the effort to desegregate schools in Prince Edward County. Visit motonmuseum.org.
