By Chris Braunlich
May 17 marked the 71st anniversary of the 1954 court decision called Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, KS — but the case began here, in Virginia.
In 1951 Virginia public education operated under the doctrine of “separate but equal,” but the definition of “equal” left much to be desired. In Farmville’s high school for African-American children, 450 students crammed into a building designed for 180. There was no gymnasium. No cafeteria. No science labs. No athletic fields. The newer school for white students up the road had all of these.
The response from city fathers to the overcrowding was to build unheated tar-paper shacks that surrounded the school like so many chicken coops.
For 16-year-old Barbara Johns, this was separate but far from equal, and so she planned to lead every student on a student strike – declaring they would not return to school until the school system agreed to build facilities truly equal to those Prince Edward County’s white students attended.
In 1951 this was, by all measures, a gutsy thing to do, and the students took the precaution of calling Richmond’s civil rights lawyers for tepresentation. There was not a great deal of support at first. Attorney Oliver Hill, who would later win the Presidential Medal of Freedom, recalled years later that “We were talking about these children being out on strike and we were fully of the opinion that we were going to advise them to go back to school …”
According to the 1965 book, They Closed Their Schools, Spottswood Robinson III, who would later become the first African American appointed chief judge of the District of Columbia Circuit Court, remembered, “I pointed out to (the students) that there were attendance laws. That was when one of them said that the jail was not big enough for all of us …”
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