With the ringing of the clock-bell on that April morning Barbara Johns launched a strike that would last the remainder of the school year. The students gathered in the small and extremely over-crowed auditorium and marched down Main Street to the County Courthouse. It was there that the students would attempt to make the county officials aware of the grave inequities in the public education provided to the black students in the county compared with the education provided to the whites. While over 450 Black students crammed into a small 8-room schoolhouse intended for 180, and overflowed into three temporary, tar paper covered buildings on the lawn, their white counterparts enjoyed their education only blocks away in a modern facility with plenty of space to stretch their legs, and their minds.

The protests caused great pains to the black community in Prince Edward County. The parents of many of the students lost their jobs with various county departments, not to mention the teachers who were out of school for lack of students.

The cause was worthy of the sacrifice. The students with their parents' support were protesting the lack of equal education to which they were entitled. Under the Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 they had rights to "separate but equal" facilities. Plessy stated that as long as the races were provided equal facilities, the states could operate separate systems, including school systems. After conversations with the NAACP, the students and supporters re-evaluated their cause and decided that "separate but equal" was not enough. Total integration should be their goal. After many law suits at the local and state levels, the case of No. 4 Davis et al. v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Virginia, et al. joined four other cases from around the nation in the Supreme Court of the United States. The five law suits became the civil right landmark case titled Brown vs. Board of Education.

One might think that this story would end with the decision of the Supreme Court to over turn the Plessy v. Ferguson "separate but equal" provision with the Brown v. Board of Education decision, as unconstitutional and, therefore, insist on the integration of public schools. It was not to be, the struggle had hardly begun. Many places in Virginia, and Prince Edward County in particular, took the tack of "massive resistance." The county decided that rather than integrating its public schools, it would close them. Unfortunately, for the many young black children throughout the county, they had no access to education for over four years. Most of the white students found ways to overcome the closing of the schools by attending private academies created for them such as Prince Edward Academy in Farmville. (It was not until after a visit from Robert F. Kennedy and other events that led to the creation of a school for black children in 1963, the year before the schools re- opened .) Consequently, many families were forced to leave Prince Edward County in search of education for their children and jobs for themselves.

Finally, in 1964, the schools of Prince Edward County re-opened, this time integrated, at least in principle. When the doors of the new Robert R. Moton High School re-opened, there were only a few white students enrolled. Today, the Prince Edward County High School is fully integrated, with almost equal numbers of white and black students. Of the five school districts involved in the landmark Supreme Court case, only Prince Edward County has succeeded in fully integrating their schools. Perhaps this is due to the county's decision to have only one central school complex for the county so that local demographics would not allow for de facto segregation.

The future of the old Moton School building is very bright. In 1996 Congressman L.F. Payne of Virginia's fifth District procured an appropriation of $200,000 for a planning project to be executed through the National Park Service to help transform this closed county school into a museum and a center for the study of civil rights. The Moton Board, which is made up of many community leaders filled with enthusiasm and dedication to this project, has been spearheading the drive to push this project forward. The Martha Forrester Council, traditionally an organization for black women, led the movement to preserve Moton, having raised the first $100,000 of the $300,000 purchase price for the school to buy it from the County. The Foundation members continue their work on a daily basis to help purchase and preserve their National Historic Landmark. The National Park Service's National Historic Landmarks Program is developing a plan plan for the Moton School. It will be available in 1999.

For more information on this project, contact William C. Bolger, National Historic Landmarks program manager for the Northeast Region, at (215) 597-1649 or send e-mail to:
Bill_Bolger@nps.gov