Last week, the local Roanoke Times published the following long editorial about one of my favorite heroes, Barbara Johns. Please read.
Editorial: America’s most successful teen activist was a Virginian
Mar 1, 2018
Douglas High School in Florida kicked off the predictable cycle of responses — liberal calls for action, conservatives call for thoughts and prayers, which is then always followed by political paralysis.
Except for one thing.
This time something different happened— teenage survivors started speaking out, taking to social media (and the regular kind of media) to demand action.
Those Florida students are the ones largely responsible for companies breaking ties with the National Rifle Association, and the fact that we’re still talking about the shooting two weeks later. We’ve become so inured to mass shootings that usually they’ve passed out of our consciousness by now.
It’s curious that we haven’t seen teen survivors turn into activists before this. Why this school? Why now? That’s a question not easily answered. Columbine took place in the pre-social media age. When the Virginia Tech shootings happened in 2007, Twitter had just been invented and adults hadn’t yet taken over Facebook. Still, we’ve had lots of other school shootings since then that didn’t produce teenage activists who have become viral sensations. Perhaps that simply proves the adage that sometimes it only takes one person to make a difference.
Critics dismiss the teenage activists as, well, teenagers. What do they know?
That’s shows a lack of understanding of history. Marquis de Lafayette was all of 19 when he arrived to help colonists fight the British. More recently, Malala Yousafzai was 15 when she was shot and nearly killed by a Taliban gunman for daring to advocate for girls to be educated. At 17, she won the Nobel Peace Prize.
We could fill a whole column with the names of teenagers who have made a difference in history. Instead, we’ll just name one — because she was a Virginian.
Barbara Rose Johns, later Barbara Powell.
If you don’t know the name, then that shows how much history has already been erased — or only selectively taught in the first place. Slate calls Johns “the most successful American high school activist ever” and it’s hard to disagree — since she helped bring down the odious practice of segregation.
In 1951, Johns was a 16-year-old farm girl in Prince Edward County. She also was African-American, which meant she attended R.R. Moton High School. The county’s black high school was separate and certainly not equal.
It was overcrowded: Built for 180 students, by Johns’ time the school enrolled more than 450 students. To handle them all, the school erected “temporary” plywood buildings with tar paper roofs that the students derided as “chicken coops.” There was no gym, no cafeteria, no science labs and not much of a roof, either. When it rained, students had to hoist umbrellas in their classrooms.
Johns had an uncle who was a minister in Alabama. His name was Vernon Johns and his church was Dexter Avenue Baptist Church — the church that Martin Luther King Jr. later pastored. On visits home to Virginia, he queried his niece about how much she knew about African-American history — and served as an inspiration for what was to come. When Johns asked why facilities at Moton were so inferior to those at the white school, a teacher waved her away, dismissively telling her to “do something about it.” If the adults were resigned to their fate, Johns was not. One day in October 1950, Johns missed the bus. While waiting for a ride, the bus to the white school passed by. Why couldn’t she go to that school? She resolved on the spot to do something. Johns gathered together some student leaders on the cinder block bleachers at the athletic field. They began planning a walk-out. This was no impulsive reaction. The students planned for months. They even code-named their plan “the Manhattan Project,” after the project that built the first atomic bomb. “We planned this thing to the gnat’s eyebrow,” fellow student John Stokes later said.
On the morning of April 23, 1951 — picked on the basis of a favorable weather forecast — Moton’s principal fielded an anonymous phone call, telling him that some of his students were in downtown Farmville causing trouble. He rushed off to deal with the supposed problem. With him out of the way, the students notified teachers that an assembly had been called. Thinking the students were simply messengers —which they were, in a way — the teachers dutifully marched their students off to the auditorium. When the curtain came up, Johns was there on the stage. She asked the teachers to wait outside. Not long afterwards, the entire student body walked out, waving signs that had been made up in advance: “Down with tar paper shacks.”
Some students marched downtown to the superintendent’s office. The superintendent vowed to “rain down the wrath of God,” one student remembered. He warned the students that their parents would be arrested for their children’s activism. One student remembered a relative asking that night: How big is the jail? The parents stood with their children. The strike lasted for two turbulent weeks — crosses were burned, some adults did lose their jobs, all surely worse than the hateful online trolling that the Florida students have been subjected to. However, the walk-out had longer-term effects.
The next month, the state’s two best-known civil rights lawyers — Oliver Hill and Spotswood Robinson — filed suit on behalf of the students. The case of Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County challenged the legal foundation of segregation. A few years later, it was merged into similar cases around the country, and was part of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision.
At the time, few remarked on the fact that it was a 16-year-old who set the Virginia case in motion. The civil rights historian Taylor Branch has remarked: “The idea that non-adults of any race might play a leading role in political events had simply failed to register on anyone.” Yet Barbara Johns did. She went on to college, married, and became a librarian in Philadelphia. She passed away in 1991, unheralded for her teenage bravery. In the years since, though, she has been recognized as an official Virginia hero. The state building that houses the attorney general’s office is named in her honor; her portrait hangs in the governor’s mansion; she is taught in fourth grade Virginia history — to students only a few years younger than she was when she made that history.