Today is an important anniversary.
69 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 all the way 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 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.
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.
