Today is an important anniversary.
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.”
Scholastic Magazine asked me to write two articles about Barbara, one for young adult readers, and one for younger readers. You can read one of my articles by clicking here. Scholastic asked me to write the articles because (I’m proud to tell you) I’m the author of the only book about Barbara Johns.
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. After the NAACP took up the case, the family home was burned down. A cross was burned in front of the school, and Barbara was sent south to Alabama to live with her uncle for her safety. (The family marveled at sending someone farther south for safety.) Her daughter was afraid of what I’d write in the book.
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.
After the book was published I met Barbara’s daughter at one of the award ceremonies (the book won several awards) and she thanked me for writing it. Now the Moton Museum celebrates Barbara Rose Johns Day.