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What Is Was Like To Go To A Segregated School

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Massive Resistance in Virginia - Conceptual Conflict 

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Massive Resistance in Virginia - Conceptual Conflict 

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Dorothy Davis Case (Pictures) - Stimulation

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Dorothy Davis Case (Pictures) - Stimulation

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In April 1951, the students at Robert Russa Moton High School in Prince Edward County, VA, went on strike. Although their protest was intended to persuade their local school board to build them a better school, it actually led to a landmark civil rights case that marked the end of legal segregation in the nation’s public schools. This was one of five cases that the Supreme Court heard collectively and consolidated under Brown v. Board of Education. Read more... Primary Sources Links go to DocsTeach, the online tool for teaching with documents from the National Archives.

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Virginia Teacher Not Sure Racial Integration was Better - Contradictions 

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Virginia Teacher Not Sure Racial Integration was Better - Contradictions 

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Virginia Teacher Not Sure Racial Integration Was Better

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Click here to watch some of Virginias Civil Rights Leaders explain what the Civil Rights Movement was all about and their experiences.

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Digital Collections come from a broad range of sources, including materials that are offensive or contain negative stereotypes. VCU Libraries provides access to these items to support research and inquiry.

About this collection
Voices of Freedom was produced by the Virginia Civil Rights Movement Video Initiative, a non-profit organization incorporated in 2002 to produce videotaped oral histories of leaders of the Civil Rights movement in Virginia. While much has been written about the historic events which occurred in the deep South, the story of the Civil Rights movement in Virginia has largely gone untold. Voices of Freedom focuses on statewide activities from the 1950s through the early 1970s and includes stories about the Jim Crow segregation laws that existed nationally through the mid-1960s; stories about the struggles to change the laws and to change public attitudes; and advice from these civil rights veterans to future generations of Virginians/Americans.

Researchers can access from this collection eleven videotaped interviews (edited down to about 25 minutes) of leaders and activists in Virginia's Civil Rights movement. The complete transcripts of these full interviews are also available. DVDs of the edited interviews are housed at James Branch Cabell Library Special Collections and Archives.

Voices of Freedom is meant to educate people about our common history, to stimulate discussion on why and how this great social movement happened, to stimulate further research into the Virginia civil rights movement and further contact with its living leaders, to further consideration of the impact of the Civil Rights movement on our current 21st century society, and to inspire future generations to involve themselves in civic affairs and act with conscience and courage.

"These interviews are about family and community strength, human aspirations, personal history and public history, social conflict, altered public attitudes and altered public policy, the workings of our democracy and the most fundamental aspects of human relations. They deal with the most important changes made in the United States during the 20th century. These are personal - often passionate - testimonials from people with firsthand experience in making history at the grassroots level. Several interviewees talking about separate water fountains and bathrooms, not being able to eat at lunch counters or try on clothes in department stores, being segregated residentially, getting 'hand me down' books and equipment in the black schools, not being able to use public libraries or public parks or even public cemeteries; several persons remembering Virginia's varied civil rights pioneers and several interviewees giving contemporary advice to young people and others who will view the video interviews."
--Ben Ragsdale, Coordinator, Virginia Civil Rights Movement Video Initiative, February, 2003

Copyright
This material is protected by copyright, and copyright is held by VCU. You are permitted to use this material in any way that is permitted by copyright. In addition, this material is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). Acknowledgment of Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries as a source is required.

Credits
Ronald E. Carrington, President of Media Consultants Global, Inc. of Richmond, was the director-producer of the video taping and interviewed the interviewees. Historian Dr. Betsy Brinson conducted preliminary oral interviews. The Virginia Historical Society (VHS) hosted two days of taping. Dr. Lauranett L. Lee, curator of African American History at the VHS, served as a consultant to this project.

Board of Directors, Voices of Freedom, Virginia Civil Rights Movement Video Initiative: Hon. Benjamin J. Lambert, III, President, Ben Ragsdale, Coordinator, Raymond H. Boone, Hon. Curtis W. Harris, Dr. Robert D. Holsworth, Curtis Lyons, Hon. Henry L. Marsh, III.

Major supporters of Voices of Freedom: The Richard S. Reynolds Foundation, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Dominion Resources, Hunton and Williams, Ukrops Supermarkets, the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, Virginia Commonwealth University, the Virginia Historical Society, and Mrs. Frances Lewis.

Video captions were created by Maddie Barger, Gabrielle Brownson, Naomy Cardoso Perez, Katie Condon, Susan Grube, Amaiya Howard, Bec Jude, Sophie Maize, and Anita Williams.

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Voices of Freedom was produced by the Virginia Civil Rights Movement Video Initiative, a non-profit organization incorporated in 2002 to produce videotaped oral histories of leaders of the Civil Rights movement in Virginia. While much has been written about the historic events which occurred in the deep South, the story of the Civil Rights movement in Virginia has largely gone untold.

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Civil Rights Activist, School Desegregation

"It was time that Negroes were treated equally with whites, time that they had a decent school, time for the students themselves to do something about it.
There wasn't any fear. I just thought - this is your moment. Seize it!"

Barbara Rose Johns was born in New York City in 1935 to Violet and Robert Johns. She moved to Prince Edward County during World War II to live on a farm with her maternal grandmother Mary Croner. She spent most of her youth living and working on her grandmother's, and later her father's, farm.

After years of frustration with Prince Edward County school which she describes (later in a memoir) as having inadequacies such as poor facilities, shabby equipment and no science laboratories or separate gymnasium, Barbara took her concerns to a teacher who responded by asking, "Why don't you do something about it?" Barbara describes feeling as though her teacher's comments were dismissive, and as a result she was somewhat discouraged. However, after months of contemplation and imagination she began to formulate a plan. As Barbara describes it,

"the plan I felt was divinely inspired because I hadn't been able to think of anything until then. The plan was to assemble together the student council members.... From this, we would formulate plans to go on strike. We would make signs and I would give a speech stating our dissatisfaction and we would march out [of] the school and people would hear us and see us and understand our difficulty and would sympathize with our plight and would grant us our new school building and our teachers would be proud and the students would learn more and it would be grand...."

Seizing the moment, on April 23, 1951, Barbara Johns, a 16 year-old high school girl in Prince Edward County, Virginia, led her classmates in a strike to protest the substandard conditions at Robert Russa Moton High School. Her idealism, planning, and persistence ultimately garnered the support of NAACP lawyers Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill to take up her cause and the cause of more equitable conditions for Moton High School. After meeting with the students and the community, lawyers Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill filed suit at the federal courthouse in Richmond, Virginia. The case was called Davis v. Prince Edward. In 1954, the Farmville case became one of five cases that the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka when it declared segregation unconstitutional.

Following the strike, Barbara was sent to live with her Uncle Vernon Johns in Montgomery, Alabama, to finish her schooling. After graduating from high school, she attended Spellman College in Atlanta, Georgia, and ultimately graduated from Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Barbara Johns went on to lead a quiet life; she married Reverend William Powell, raised five children and was a librarian in the Philadelphia Public Schools. Barbara Johns Powell died in 1991.

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Biography: Barbara Rose Johns Powell, 1935-1991 - Moton Museum

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Barbara Rose Johns, a civil rights activist, was one of the key figures in Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka. Learn more about her life and work.

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Click here for all of the big events that happened in the Civil Rights Movement in Virginia

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Civil Rights Movement in Virginia | Virginia Museum of History & Culture

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The civil rights movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s was one phase in the longer black freedom struggle that began when the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619 and continues today. Much of the civil rights movement was seen on television. Because the most notorious events and horrific ima…