By Marian Wright Edelman
As a teenager, many of Barbara John’s wildest fantasies revolved around a surprising topic: a new school. “My imagination ran wild – and I dreamed that a powerful man with great fortune would build us a new school building or that our parents would get together and surprise us with this great new building and we would have a big party – and I even imagined that. “A great storm came through and blew the main building down and splintered the huts – and from this rubble rose this magnificent building and all the students rejoiced and even the teachers wept. . . “
Then came the day when 16 year old Barbara decided to make her dreams come true. “It was time for negroes to be treated equally with whites, time for them to have a decent school, time for the students themselves to do something about it. There was no fear. I just thought – this is your moment. Take it! “
The year was 1951 and Barbara was a junior at the separated Robert R. Moton High School in Prince Edward County, Virginia. As her younger sister Joan later recalled, “Most of the school supplies we got were torn and tattered and we didn’t have enough materials to write on. The school we went to was overcrowded. Consequently, the district decided to build three wooden huts in which we can hold classes. A wooden hut looks like a dilapidated black building that resembles a chicken coop on a farm. . . It was a very difficult environment to learn. And I remember we always talked about how bad the conditions are, but we didn’t know what to do about it. One day my sister and a group of students she had chosen decided to do something about it. “
The “something about it” was that in April 1951 Barbara organized and led a student strike at Moton High. More than 400 students left class to protest the dire conditions at their school and to demand facilities more similar to the county’s white high school. NAACP attorneys Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill became involved after Barbara persistently called her Richmond office and after students agreed that they were willing to fight for an integrated school rather than just a more separate one.
The lawsuit against the Prince Edward County Education Board eventually ended with four similar cases from NAACP attorneys in Brown vs. Board of Education et al. bundled, leading to the landmark Supreme Court decision banning segregation in public schools in 1954.
Brave decision
Barbara Johns’ brave decision to do something for her dream helped change history, as did the brave actions of many children and adolescents during the civil rights movement. Unfortunately, Brown’s victory over the Board of Education wasn’t the end of the story for black children in Prince Edward County.
As shameful as the conditions were in their old, pitifully dissimilar schools, what came next was even more shameful. Rather than complying with the US Supreme Court ruling, the state of Virginia pursued a campaign of “massive resistance” and enacted a variety of new laws and guidelines to prevent desegregation in public schools. Other court rulings followed that made Virginia’s actions illegal.
While other counties eventually gave way, Prince Edward County’s board of directors continued to refuse to close their schools and instead voted in June 1959 to close the county’s entire public school system.
A number of schools in the white county were quickly reopened as separate “private schools”, aided by state grants and tax credits from the county. They became the model for similar “segregation academies” all over the south. But Prince Edward County had no schools for black children or poor white families in the largely rural community who could not afford the modest tuition fees at the new private schools. The denial of public education lasted for the next five years.
In a March 1963 Earth 100 speech known not to offer free public education, Communist China, North Vietnam, Sarawak, Singapore, British Honduras – and Prince Edward County, Virginia are. Something has to be done about Prince Edward County. ”It took another Supreme Court decision to eventually force the county to reopen its public school system with closed schools in 1964.
Seventy years after the student strike, the former Moton School is now a National Historic Landmark and museum honoring “the birthplace of the student-led American civil rights revolution.” Barbara John’s parents sent her to live with relatives in Montgomery, Alabama to graduate from high school. She then attended Spelman College and Drexel University, raised five children with her husband, the Reverend William Powell, and became a librarian at the Philadelphia Public Schools before she died in 1991.
Today, as there is disagreement about what type of history schools are allowed to be taught, we must continue to ensure that children learn the full truth about stories like this and the cloud of witnesses like Barbara Johns Powell who sacrificed for a fairer America. Your legacy of fighting for quality education for every child is still the unfinished business of the Civil Rights Movement and America.
Marian Wright Edelman is the Founder and President Emeritus of the Children’s Defense Fund.
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