73 years ago, on April 23, 1951, in Farmville, VA, Barbara Johns led a walkout of her segregated high school to protest the unfair and deplorable conditions of her school.
What?! You don’t know who Barbara Johns was?
She led her walkout more than 4 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus, and before MLK, Jr. embraced nonviolence as the way to equality.
After she and her classmates turned the rural town of Farmville upside down, she called in the NAACP.
The NAACP took their case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Barbara and her classmates became plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case that ended segregation in America. Their case was combined with cases from other states.
OK so, why wasn’t she given credit for her role as an early leader in the Modern Civil Rights movement and one of the first to use nonviolence as a means of achieving racial equality?
Taylor Branch, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, argues that Barbara wasn’t given credit because she was a child.
I'll add that she wasn't recognized because she was a girl, poor, and black—what scholars call the “triple invisibility.” After her strike, her life was threatened and her family home was burned down.
A few years ago, Scholastic Magazine asked me to write two articles about Barbara, one for middle school level readers, and one for younger readers.
When I started researching this book (I started in 2001) her family was afraid to talk to me because so much violence had come their way.
Her daughter was terrified of what I'd write in the book. Afer the book was published I met her at one of the award ceremonies (the book won several awards) and she had tears she was so happy I'd written it.
Now the Moton Museum celebrates Barbara Rose Johns day:
One day I won't be the author of the only book about Barbara Johns, but I will always be the author of the first book.
I could write a book about the experience of going through Virginia trying to get the information for this book. People finally trusted me enough to pull letters and photographs out of closets and attics.
I met a lot of people and learned more than went into the book.
@Teri_Kanefield One thing that doesn't really get discussed regarding the Civil Rights Movement is how Black intellectuals and activists spent decades probing, strategizing, and discussing tactics. They ended up with asymmetrical nonviolent warfare as a strategy, and it mostly worked.
@Teri_Kanefield thank you for this thread! I would totally watch a TV show based on your experience of writing the book that covers the life of Barbara Johns as you discover it!
@Teri_Kanefield
Thank you for writing this book. I read it a couple years ago (was happy my library had it). So much history of our country has been ignored. It makes me angry that certain states and counties would suppress such books.
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