During this Black History Month let us celebrate again Barbara Johns, who has been called the most successful American high school activist ever by Slate magazine and the Roanoke Times newspaper. And I agree with them.
She was the personification of the theme of this year’s Black History Month, “Resistance,” as she helped bring down the awful practice of segregation.
Who was Barbara Johns and what did she do specifically? I will use again words from a March 1, 2018, editorial by the Roanoke Times.
In 1951, Johns was a 16-year-old farm girl in Prince Edward County. She also was African American, which meant she attended R.R. Moton High School. The county’s black high school was separate and certainly not equal.
It was overcrowded: Built for 180 students, by Johns’ time the school enrolled more than 450 students. To handle them all, the school erected “temporary” plywood buildings with tar paper roofs that the students derided as “chicken coops.” There was no gym, no cafeteria, no science labs, and not much of a roof, either. When it rained, students had to hoist umbrellas in their classrooms.
Johns had an uncle who was a minister in Alabama. His name was Vernon Johns and his church was Dexter Avenue Baptist Church — the church that Martin Luther King Jr. later pastored. On visits home to Virginia, he queried his niece about how much she knew about African-American history — and served as an inspiration for what was to come. When Johns asked why facilities at Moton were so inferior to those at the white school, a teacher waved her away, dismissively telling her to “do something about it.” If the adults were resigned to their fate, Johns was not. One day in October 1950, Johns missed the bus. While waiting for a ride, the bus to the white school passed by. Why couldn’t she go to that school? She resolved on the spot to do something. Johns gathered together some student leaders on the cinder block bleachers at the athletic field. They began planning a walk-out. This was no impulsive reaction. The students planned for months. They even code-named their plan “the Manhattan Project,” after the project that built the first atomic bomb. “We planned this thing to the gnat’s eyebrow,” fellow student John Stokes later said.
On the morning of April 23, 1951 — picked on the basis of a favorable weather forecast — Moton’s principal fielded an anonymous phone call, telling him that some of his students were in downtown Farmville causing trouble. He rushed off to deal with the supposed problem. With him out of the way, the students notified teachers that an assembly had been called. Thinking the students were simply messengers —which they were, in a way — the teachers dutifully marched their students off to the auditorium. When the curtain came up, Johns was there on the stage. She asked the teachers to wait outside. Not long afterward, the entire student body walked out, waving signs that had been made up in advance: “Down with tar paper shacks.”
Some students marched downtown to the superintendent’s office. The superintendent vowed to “rain down the wrath of God,” one student remembered. He warned the students that their parents would be arrested for their children’s activism. One student remembered a relative asking that night: How big is the jail? The parents stood with their children. The strike lasted for two turbulent weeks — crosses were burned, and some adults did lose their jobs, all surely worse than the hateful online trolling that the Florida students have been subjected to. However, the walk-out had longer-term effects.
[Note: Johns and her 114 compatriots petitioned the NAACP for help. The organization voiced initial misgivings about the suit, but Johns’ group insisted.
The next month, the state’s two best-known civil rights lawyers — Oliver Hill and Spotswood Robinson — filed suit on behalf of the students. The case of Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County challenged the legal foundation of segregation. A few years later, it was merged into similar cases around the country and was part of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision.
At the time, few remarked on the fact that it was a 16-year-old who set the Virginia case in motion. The civil rights historian Taylor Branch has remarked: “The idea that non-adults of any race might play a leading role in political events had simply failed to register on anyone.” Yet Barbara Johns did. She went on to college, married, and became a librarian in Philadelphia.
She passed away in 1991, unheralded for her teenage bravery. In the years since, though, she has been recognized as an official Virginia hero. The state building that houses the attorney general’s office is named in her honor; her portrait hangs in the governor’s mansion; she is taught in fourth grade Virginia history — to students only a few years younger than she was when she made that history.
In another honor, replacing Robert E. Lee, she will join George Washington in representing Virginia in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol Building.
