Sixty years ago this weekend, students at R.R. Moton High School went on strike to protest the all-black school's overcrowded and inferior conditions, starting down a path that would forever change this nation.
They used a ruse to pull the principal out of school, telling him some children were in trouble downtown. Barbara Johns, then 16, assembled her fellow students and told them she did not accept the leaky, inadequately heated tar-paper shacks that served as classrooms. The school's 450 students followed Johns' lead, joining a two-week strike.
Now, on the anniversary of the student strike at Moton High, a fitting tribute is under construction: a state-of-the-art, six-gallery permanent exhibit at the school-turned-museum that will trace Prince Edward County's journey from school segregation to integration, including five years when the public schools were closed in defiance of court orders to integrate.
After the strike, attorneys for the Virginia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Oliver W. Hill and Spottswood W. Robinson III, filed a lawsuit on behalf of the students seeking to desegregate schools in the county. The suit would become one of five folded into the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, which the U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1954, striking down "separate-but-equal" education.
"I can't believe it was 60 years ago that we walked out of school just to get a better school, better books, better opportunities to be educated," said former Moton student Joy Cabarrus Speakes, who was 12. "At the time we walked out, we never thought it would end up in the courts. We just thought we would get a better school."
She said it has been amazing to see the impact of the walkout.
"What happened in Prince Edward County changed the nation," she said.
For the past week, the community has been commemorating the anniversary, and last weekend it held a wreath-laying ceremony to honor Johns, who died of cancer in 1991 after marrying, moving to Philadelphia and becoming a librarian. The Rev. J. Samuel Williams said at Johns' gravesite that she combined courage with conviction.
"She never had the slightest inkling that she would participate in helping to turn this world right-side up," Williams said, "and she did."
Johns' sister, Joan Johns Cobbs, said her family struggled as a result of the strike, and Johns suffered for her convictions, too. A cross was burned at her family's home, and she was sent to live with her uncle, Vernon Johns, a civil-rights activist and firebrand preacher in Montgomery, Ala.
"At that time … whenever you did anything that was not suitable in the sight of white people, then you were either injured or you were brought down to your knees, so to speak," Cobbs said. "She stood up in front of everyone, she and the other classmates, and they made a stand, a courageous stand."
After the walkout, the county built a new black high school but continued to use Moton as an elementary school until 1995. A local civic group, the Martha E. Forrester Council of Women, purchased the building from the county for $300,000 and converted it into the Robert Russa Moton Museum.
For years, it served as an uninviting, volunteer-run museum, a mostly empty space with a few handmade exhibits that opened infrequently. But the new director, Lacy Ward Jr., who came on board three years ago, laid out a plan to transform it into a civil-rights destination.
The museum has raised $4 million of the needed $6 million to renovate, with contributions from the Dominion Foundation and Altria Group, among others. The museum also received leftover money from the governor's inauguration. Ward has hired a staff of eight people and is planning outreach to tour-bus companies, hoping to attract people from across the country interested in learning more about civil-rights history. Ward said they will position themselves to train America's civics teachers how to teach civil rights, in part by preparing extensive Web-based resources.
Ward hopes that over the next two to three years, the renovation will raise the museum to the level of the South's most sophisticated civil-rights museums, including the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tenn., and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama.
Ward said the Robert Russa Moton Museum takes a post-racial approach to teaching the community's history — it teaches from an American perspective rather than a racial perspective. The museum's exhibits will include information on the county Board of Supervisors' 1959 decision not to fund public schools, shutting them down rather than integrate and becoming the only locality in the nation to keep its schools closed for five years, he said.
The museum also will tell the story of community leaders' decision to establish a school for white children, known as Prince Edward Academy. No option was provided for the county's black children. In 1963, four years after the schools closed, the Kennedy administration helped form the Prince Edward Free School Association to educate the 1,500 black students locked out of school. A year later, the public schools reopened under order of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Telling the entire community's story "brings more people into the fold of understanding it in the fuller context of America," he said.
Speakes, now a museum board member, embraces the plan Ward has laid out.
"I think it's the greatest thing that could happen," she said. "People can walk through and actually see what a 16-year-old girl did in 1951 … what effect it had on families and what the end result was."
But not everyone agrees with the vision.
A.D. "Chuckie" Reid, vice mayor of the town of Farmville and a Moton board member, said he supports the mission with some reservations. For example, he expressed concern that tickets to the anniversary gala started at $250. Ward said the museum picked up the tab for plaintiffs and hosts other free events.
Reid also questions the decision to incorporate stories about Prince Edward's white response to efforts to integrate the schools into the galleries, such as the story of the founding of the white academy, now known as Fuqua School, which did not integrate until 1986.
"It's a museum, and it's supposed to be the history of the school closing, so I don't know where this other story fits in," Reid said. "It's a big question mark."
The museum renovation was scheduled to be completed by this weekend's anniversary, celebrated with a gala honoring the lawsuit's plaintiffs Friday, a Moton alumni reunion this weekend, and church services honoring Johns and the Rev. L. Francis Griffin, a civil-rights pioneer who led the county's fight for better schools, on April 17.
The first phase of the project, the auditorium remodel, now is projected to be done in July. The trim and ceilings have been restored to the original Kelly green and the floors have been stripped to look the way they used to. Ward said he needs to raise an additional $2 million to build out the five classrooms into galleries that ring the auditorium.
He said the South's other civil-rights museums have been products of local government support, and he is "highly disappointed" that the county has not donated more significantly. Since 2008, Prince Edward County has given $88,375.
"As the project has grown, local support has actually retreated," Ward said.
County Administrator Wade Bartlett said that since 2002, Prince Edward has allocated the museum almost $250,000. This year, he recommended level funding at $35,000 for fiscal 2012.
"The county is supportive of the whole project and views it as very worthwhile," he said. "They are just like any other nonprofit, in our view, that we provide support for."
County Supervisor Robert M. "Bobby" Jones said that if the county's finances improve, the board might consider sponsoring a gallery at the museum.
In 2008, the Board of Supervisors denounced the decision of its 1959 board not to fund the county schools and then lit a Light of Reconciliation in the county courthouse's bell tower honoring Johns and her fellow students who participated in the walkout. Later, the board posted a plaque in front of the courthouse apologizing for closing the schools.
Ward's father, Lacy Ward Sr., a former supervisor, criticized the board for failing to participate in the anniversary worship services last weekend.
Speakes said the supervisors need to get more involved in the museum and healing the county's wounds.
"They did this reconciliation, they put a light up, but I think they felt that that was it," she said. "It hasn't gone any further. You can't just put a plaque out and then nobody talk to each other. You have to come together as a community.
"That's something that really has to be worked on."
Griffin's son, the Rev. Eric Griffin, a pastor in Greensboro, N.C., who last weekend spoke at services to honor his father, cheered the work at the museum. His father, who died in 1980, was a "champion for reconciliation and peace" and would have enjoyed seeing all the community's major institutions gathered around the table to plan Moton's future, he said.
Two years ago, Eric Griffin suggested at a symposium on the 50th anniversary of the closing of the public schools that Fuqua School, which began as an all-white school in 1959, should be shut down to help heal the community's wounds. But he now believes that his father would have wanted the "complete healing and reconciliation of all of Farmville's and Prince Edward County's citizens."
"If my father were alive, he may well visit the Fuqua School and talk with the young people there if he were invited to do so."
Fuqua School's president, Ruth S. Murphy, has worked to recruit black students to the academy. She sits on the Moton board and is part of the "Our Schools, Our Vision" local effort that works to teach the county's history of segregation to integration at all local schools.
Charles I. Taylor, the museum board's assistant secretary, said it's the museum's obligation to tell all the community's stories, not just a select few. "They're all a part of us," he said.
He was a student in Prince Edward when the schools closed and was sent to Kittrell College in Kittrell, N.C., to finish his schooling. But many children he attended school with were forced to stay home to help out on their families' farms, becoming known as the county's "lost generation" of children who missed five years of schooling.
Taylor compared the story of Prince Edward's complex history to a centipede, which doesn't walk well without all its legs. "It's important to have all the parts."
"We need to take the past and make it an avenue for the future," Taylor said. He believes that with the museum's plans for public education, "it's happening."
"People don't get that far in a hurry," he said.
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