An early strike for equality

Some years back, Barbara Johns Powell wrote about her long-ago dreams as a 15-year-old in Prince Edward County, where she attended the all-black Moton High School, a facility whose shortcomings greatly distressed her: "My imagination would run rampant — and I would dream that some mighty man of great wealth built us a new school building or that our parents got together and surprised us with this grand new building and we had a big celebration — and I even imagined that a great storm came through and blew down the main building and splattered the shacks to splinters — and out of this wreckage rose this magnificent building and all the students were joyous and even the teachers cried."

She went on about how — this was October 1950 — she suddenly worked out what she must do to make change happen: "We would formulate plans to go on a strike. We would make signs and I would give a speech stating our dissatisfaction and we would march out the school and people would hear us and see us and understand our difficulty and would sympathize with our plight and would grant us our new school building and our teachers would be proud and the students would learn more — it would be grand."

On April 23, 1951, the 16-year-old junior led her 400-plus classmates out on strike, and the black community came together to support the effort to seize more of the "equal" in "separate but equal." Civil rights attorney Oliver Hill of Richmond agreed to take the matter into federal court, provided the students and their parents agreed to sue for an end to segregation in public schools, not just a better high school for black youth in one county.

The case from Southside Virginia became part of the cluster of cases known as Brown v. Board of Education . Before the Supreme Court handed down its rulings in those cases in 1954 and 1955, the county had constructed the new facility that Barbara Johns and her classmates in Southside Virginia had gone out on strike to obtain. At last the high school was more equal (although not the grade schools), but the case against segregated schooling nevertheless went on.

Barbara Johns never again lived in Prince Edward. Before school opened that fall, after a cross-burning on the high school grounds, her family sent her off for safekeeping in Montgomery, Ala., with her uncle, Vernon Johns, the fiery preacher at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church who was Martin Luther King Jr.'s predecessor.

There she graduated from the same high school, at Alabama State College for Negroes, that Rosa Parks had attended some years earlier. In 1954, the year of the first Brown decision, the Johns family's home burnt to the ground. Barbara's sister, Joan, graduated from the new high school, but their three younger brothers continued school in Washington, D.C., where the family moved after the fire.

The very day in late May 1955 that the Supreme Court called in principle for desegregation to begin, the Prince Edward County's Board of Supervisors resolved to close the public schools rather than permit any desegregation to take place.

Four years later, when the court order finally came to begin desegregation in Prince Edward, county officials acted out their declared intent. They would terminate public schooling in the county. That September, white students began attending what became Prince Edward Academy, a so-called private school funded for years largely through public money.

Elsewhere across Virginia, the contest over segregated schools played out in different ways, across varying timelines.

In 1956 the General Assembly enacted Massive Resistance laws that barred any locality from voluntarily desegregating its schools and that required the governor to close a school if it came under court order to desegregate. Indeed, in the fall of 1958 Gov. Lindsay Almond ordered some schools in Warren County, Charlottesville and Norfolk closed, and they remained closed until court rulings the following January overturned key portions of Massive Resistance.

The legislature responded by narrowly approving the continuance of a statewide system of public schools, even if they underwent some desegregation, and at the same time by rediscovering the merits of the local option, so that localities could decide for themselves to close their schools, which Prince Edward soon did.

Year after year, black students went elsewhere or did without — and all had their lives disrupted. Some finished high school at Kittrell Junior College in North Carolina. Some went to stay with relatives in other counties or states. Many families, white and black, pulled up stakes and moved away.

Prince Edward's enrollment figures showed a small, steady rise in white enrollment through the 1950s, at the same time black enrollment showed a persistent decline. But the total black population dropped sharply at the end of the decade, and census-takers also counted fewer whites in 1960 than in 1950.

Among the county's black leaders, the Rev. Francis Griffin stood out throughout those years. Among whites, Longwood College dean Gordon Moss took a lonely stand for public schools and, increasingly, for desegregation.

For 13 years, from 1951 to 1964, the Prince Edward case was in the courts, state and federal, as judges ruled on countless questions concerning race, funds and schools. In the summer of 1963, President John F. Kennedy's administration, and more particularly the office of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, led an extraordinary effort to get four Free Schools open that fall so that black children could once again attend school in Prince Edward.

In May 1964, the Supreme Court finally ruled that the county must reopen the public schools, and the county did, although at a level of support far lower than was needed or that the school board was recommending.

From the time the schools were closed in 1959, Barbara Johns Powell mourned the unintended trajectory of events in Prince Edward, as a generation of students missed out on school or had to make wrenching adjustments to continue their educations.

When those schools reopened, they were nominally desegregated, though a mere handful of white students at first attended. Over the years, ever more white students enrolled, and the county increased its funding of the schools.

The 1953 Moton High School building — the one the student strikers had bravely sought and finally secured — is today the centerpiece of a campus that includes the county's elementary school, its middle school and its high school.

Last year, the graduating seniors wrote in their yearbook of how, 50 years earlier, their counterparts could not have been graduating from a public high school in Prince Edward. Now, they knew, students both black and white were routinely taking classes with teachers both black and white — the new norm in Prince Edward. Every school day a fleet of shiny yellow buses rolls into action, each with bold black lettering on the sides, "Prince Edward County Public Schools."

Today, sharing the grounds of the Virginia Capitol with a statue of Massive Resistance leader Harry F. Byrd Sr. is a sculpture featuring Barbara Johns and the struggle for school equalization and desegregation in Prince Edward in the early 1950s. In Farmville, on the strike's 60th anniversary, the former Moton High School officially opens as the Robert Russa Moton Museum: A Center for the Study of Civil Rights in Education.