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The Story of the Moton High Protest

Fifty-five years after the 1896 landmark Supreme Court case, Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld segregation and the constitutionality of the "separate but equal" doctrine, African-American students eager to learn and advance were still facing the harsh reality of this ruling. They were relegated to inferior educational facilities and, by segregation, denied the access and opportunity that comes from a diverse learning environment. 

On April 23, 1951, a brave 16-year-old girl named Barbara Johns led a walkout and demonstration with her fellow students at Robert R. Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia, to protest the intolerable conditions at the school. Moton High had twice the number of students it was designed for and offered no cafeteria or gymnasium facilities. Teachers were poorly compensated compared to those in the all white high school. 

On that spring day over 450 students followed Barbara Johns’ lead and walked-out of Moton High. A month later, on May 23, 1951, two civil rights attorneys from Virginia, Oliver White Hill and Spottswood Robinson III, filed suit in the Federal District Court in Richmond for the immediate integration of Prince Edward County schools.

That case, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, was eventually joined with four other cases to become Brown V. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.  Davis is the only one of the five cases to have been initiated by the students themselves. The resulting Supreme Court decision in 1954 struck down the “separate but equal” racial doctrine that governed school policy. It was a victory for all those involved in the struggle for full civil rights. But it was only the beginning of a long struggle against “massive resistance” and toward racial integration that would eventually bring dramatic and positive societal change to Virginia and to the rest of the country.