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DID YOU KNOW?
The student strike at Robert Russa Moton High School happened four years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, six years before the Little Rock crisis, and nine years before the sit-ins, making it the first major group protest of the Civil Rights Movement.
The Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County case is Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.
The use of the word Brown as a catchall for school desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s obscures the fact that the case was actually five separate cases consolidated into one. Celebrating Davis is celebrating Brown.
The memorial reminds all Americans, not just Virginians, that the Old Dominion has a civil rights story to tell that is just as important and compelling as any state in the South.
2007 is the centennial of Oliver Hill’s birth. As a lawyer, Mr. Hill was involved in every major civil rights case in Virginia. The memorial honors him --and by extension--every case in Virginia, not just the one in Prince Edward County.
The Prince Edward County case drew on the many challenges to segregation happening at the time around Virginia—in Norfolk, Arlington, Pulaski County, and King George County to cite just a few examples. Without these other efforts, the Prince Edward case would not have been possible.
Davis is the only one of the five cases combined to create Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, to have been initiated by the students themselves.
Barbara Johns was inspired by her uncle, Vernon Johns, who preceded Martin Luther King at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.
The Prince Edward case dragged on longer than any of the other Brown cases.
•More than 14 years passed between the start of the student strike and the start of integrated classes in Prince Edward County schools.
•An entire generation of children lost five years of their education to advance education for all. The memorial celebrates their struggle and sacrifice, but also serves to remind Virginians of the debt we all owe to their courage.
•The situation in Prince Edward County inspired Freedom Summer in Mississippi and the Prince Edward Free School served as a model for some of the teaching in Mississippi’s Freedom Schools in the summer of 1964.
•It is the only case to produce a second landmark Supreme Court ruling (Griffin in 1964). The ruling in Griffin brought an end to the idea that education could be sacrificed to protect segregation, foreclosing some of the most extreme ideas segregationists had to avoid Brown.
•As in Brown, Griffin reaffirmed the importance of education in American life and its benefits for both black and white Americans.
•Without Griffin, Virginia’s—and America’s—public schools would have been crippled.
The Prince Edward case inspired the writers of Virginia’s 1971 state constitution. They put education in the Bill of Rights to prevent a re-occurrence of this tragedy.
Virginia’s commitment to building a world-class school system thus traces its roots back to that day in 1951 when Barbara Johns and the other students walked out of Moton High School.
Capitol Square Civil Rights Memorial Foundation
Post Office Box 9171
Richmond, Virginia 23227
804-272-8008 office
540-301-1422 fax
Lou Arnatt Kadiri , Executive Director