The 16-Year-Old Who Fought Segregation: A courageous protest by Barbara Johns helped lead to a Supreme Court ruling 65 years ago that segregated public schools were unconstitutional.

• Author: Bubar, Joe
• Position: TIMES PAST 1954

Barbara Johns had finally had enough. It was the spring of 1951, and her school, the all-black Robert Russa Moton High School in Prince Edward County, Virginia, was literally falling apart. The ceilings were so cracked that Barbara, a 16-year-old junior, and her classmates had to use umbrellas indoors when it rained. The toilets in the one-story building barely worked, and there was no gym, cafeteria, or lockers.

At the time, Virginia was one of 21 states where segregation in public schools was required or permitted by law. The schools for blacks and those for whites were supposed to be equal, but they never were. The all-white Farmville High School, just minutes from Moton, for example, had spacious classrooms, modern heating, and a real cafeteria.

Frustrated with the school district's refusal to pay for upgrades, Barbara rallied hundreds of her classmates to walk out of their school in protest on April 23, 1951.

"There wasn't any fear," she would later recall. "I just thought, This is your moment. Seize it.'"

The students, with lawyers from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.), soon filed suit against the district, demanding the integration of public schools in Prince Edward County. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it was bundled with similar lawsuits challenging segregated schools in other states. The combined cases became known as Brown v. Board of Education.

On May 17, 1954, the Court ruled 9-0 that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional--a landmark decision still hailed as a defining moment in civil rights history 65 years later. 7 Before Brown, "schoolchildren of different races didn't go to school together in any significant number in any state, not just in the South," says Rachel Devlin, the author of A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America's Schools. "So it was hard to imagine.... There was this real sense of 'Could it even be done?"'

Students on Strike

Brown was a reversal of the Supreme Court's position on segregation. In 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court had established the doctrine of "separate but equal" that served as the legal underpinning for segregation (see Timeline, p. 20). In most of the South, state and local laws required separation of the races in transportation, restaurants, schools, and other public spaces. De facto segregation also existed in the North, even if most states there didn't have laws mandating or permitting it.

Barbara's school, Moton, had been built in the 1930s to accommodate 180 students, but by 1950, 450 students were enrolled. Teachers often had to hold classes in wooden shacks covered with black tar paper or on school buses.

"We wanted so much here and had so little," Barbara later said. "And we had talents and abilities here that weren't really being realized."

In the fall of 1950, Barbara convinced Carrie Stokes, the student body president, and her brother John, who was vice president, to go with her to school board meetings to pressure the district into financing renovations.

Meeting after meeting, however, they kept hearing the same refrain from the board: "Soon."

Barbara grew tired of waiting. What they needed to do, she decided, was go on strike, and stay out of school until the district acted.

Barbara organized a group of juniors and seniors to help her execute her plan. On April 23, they lured their principal, M. Boyd Jones, out of school by making up a story about some students who were getting in trouble with the police downtown. When Principal Jones rushed to check on the phony situation, the group passed around notes, calling for an assembly in the auditorium. They had signed the notes "BJ."--Barbara's and Principal Jones's initials.

Hundreds of students crammed into the auditorium, expecting to see their principal onstage. But when the purple curtain went up, they were shocked: Barbara was at the podium. She delivered a rousing speech that brought the students in the auditorium to their feet--and out of school on strike.

The students also sent a letter to the N.A.A.C.P., asking for help getting a new school. The timing was perfect. N.A.A.C.P. lawyers, including Thurgood Marshall--who would become the first black Supreme Court justice--had been fighting segregation in education since the 1930s. They'd already won Supreme Court cases that desegregated an all-white university and an all-white law school and were now looking for students who could help them challenge segregation in primary education. The N.A.A.C.P. agreed to take up the Moton case only if the students were willing to make it about integrating schools, rather than a new school for themselves.

At a packed meeting between N.A.A.C.P. lawyers and much of Prince Edward County's black community, many adults, including a former Moton principal, argued that pursuing integration would be too dangerous. But Barbara gave a speech that brought audience members to tears, convincing them of the need for integrated schools and showing the N.A.A.C.P. lawyers that these students had what it took to bring their case to court.

A Case for Equality

While their lawsuit wound its way through the judicial system, the students returned to school. But Barbara paid a price for organizing the strike: She received death threats, and the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in her yard. For her safety, her parents sent her to live with relatives in Alabama.

Across the nation, nearly a dozen other desegregation lawsuits had been filed in the immediate aftermath of World War II--almost all by young women and girls and their parents. In 1951, in Topeka, Kansas, third-grader Linda Brown's father, Oliver, and 12 other parents sued the school board for discrimination. The Supreme Court combined that case with three similar lawsuits, including Barbara's, into Brown (see "Demanding Their...