Barbara Rose Johns (1935-1991)

Barbara Johns, civil rights pioneer, was born in New York and moved to her parents' native Prince Edward County as a child. In April 1951, at age 16, she led a student walkout to protest conditions at the segregated Robert Russa Moton High School, where facilities were vastly inferior to those at the county’s white high school. The students, demanding a new school, sought aid from the Virginia NAACP, which instead offered to represent them in a lawsuit seeking an end to segregation. Davis v. Prince Edward was the only student-initiated case consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education (1954), in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that public school segregation was unconstitutional.

Department of Historic Resources, 2020