The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence isn’t the only important anniversary in 2026. This year also marks the 75th anniversary of an extraordinary case of student activism that helped lead to the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing segregated schools.

In April 1951, 16-year-old Barbara Rose Johns organized a student strike to protest the shabby conditions and inadequate education at her segregated Black high school in Prince Edward County, Virginia.

Prince Edward County is located about 65 miles southwest of Richmond and around 30 miles east of Appomattox, or 48 kilometers, in a part of Virginia known as Southside. African Americans constituted almost half the population, but they were largely prevented from voting before passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and could not eat in local restaurants before passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The public schools were segregated, and for decades there was no Black high school at all.

In 1939, following years of pressure by Black residents, the white authorities opened a high school for African Americans. That segregated institution was named for Robert Roosa Moton, who had been raised in Prince Edward County and served as an administrator at Hampton Institute in Virginia before being appointed as the second head of Tuskegee Institute following the death of Booker T. Washington.

The new building became severely overcrowded almost immediately. Although it was designed for a maximum enrollment of 180, attendance reached 219 the year after it opened and 377 in 1947.

The following year, the school board put up three temporary outbuildings to accommodate the overflow. Many Black residents scorned these buildings as “tar paper shacks” because of their covering and dilapidated condition. They had inefficient wood stoves that provided limited heating, and their thin walls often leaked when rain fell.

The shabbiness of these interim structures became a source of continuing tension, as negotiations between the Black community and white authorities for a more permanent facility dragged on inconclusively into early 1951.

As an 11th grader at Moton High School, Johns began talking with some of her fellow students about taking action to protest the shacks and improve their education.

On April 23, 1951, someone lured Moton’s principal, Boyd Jones, out of the building on the pretext that two students were in trouble elsewhere in town. After Jones left, Johns summoned the student body to the auditorium, where she exhorted her peers to walk out to protest the deplorable condition of their school.

Johns also sent a letter to Oliver W. Hill and Spottswood W. Robinson III, two Richmond civil rights lawyers who worked closely with the NAACP, asking for their legal assistance.

The strike went on for two weeks. During that time, Hill and Robinson met twice with hundreds of students and parents. The meetings grew out of the lawyers’ initial skepticism about litigating over school conditions in rural Prince Edward County, where they feared that plaintiffs would be subject to severe physical and economic retaliation.

Those meetings persuaded Hill and Robinson that the Black community broadly supported an effort to obtain desegregation rather than mere improvements in the separate Black schools. The lawyers therefore filed their lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on behalf of scores of Black students and parents, alleging that segregated schools violated the 14th Amendment.

Victory – and messy history

Johns’ initiative had both short- and long-term consequences.

In the immediate aftermath of the strike, the all-white school board fired Jones, whom they regarded as having put the students up to their activism despite his – and the students’ – insistence that the whole affair was a student initiative.

The lawsuit – and other similar suits filed in South Carolina, Delaware and Kansas – failed in the lower court. The plaintiffs appealed to the Supreme Court, which reversed those judgments and ruled in the consolidated case called Brown v. Board of Education that segregated public schools were unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the student strike at Moton, Johns’ family feared that she would be in physical danger if she remained in Prince Edward County for her senior year. They sent her to live with her uncle Vernon Johns, a minister and outspoken civil rights advocate, in Montgomery, Alabama.

Johns graduated from Drexel University and worked for many years as a public school librarian in Philadelphia before her death in 1991.

The post-Brown history of Prince Edward County is very complicated. White authorities closed the public schools for five years to avoid desegregation. For a long time afterward, virtually all the white children went to a private academy that opened when the public schools closed.

But that messy history cannot detract from the courage and impact of Barbara Johns.

In December 2025, her statue replaced that of Robert E. Lee as one of the two Virginians displayed in the U.S. Capitol. Johns is there – along with George Washington.

© The Conversation