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âA Little Child Shall Lead Themâ
Segregation affected every aspect of southern life by the early twentieth century. Laws required the separation of the races in transportation, assemblies, accommodations, neighborhoods, and public schools. In practice, however, segregation violated the key tenet of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision (see p. 12), which justified segregation with the legal concept of âseparate but equal.â During the Jim Crow era, separate was rarely, if ever, equal.
âAn obsessive preoccupation with race and class was the central cause of the Southâs tragic neglect of public education,â explained journalist John Egerton. âAll too many of the white men who dominated political and cultural life in the region for decades after Reconstruction viewed education as a privilege reserved primarily for their sons and others of the same station; they had little concern for the schooling of women and almost no interest at all in the education of blacks or poor whites.â1 In the first decades of the twentieth century, major funding for public education in the South came from northern businessmen and philanthropists. As late as 1935, only three of the eleven former Confederate states provided free textbooks to children.
Virginiaâs public schools had been segregated since their inception in 1870, and funding disparities plagued the system from the beginning. In 1925, the Commonwealth of Virginia spent an average of $40.27 per year on each white public school student but only $10.47 on each black student. Facilities for black students, black teacher salaries, course offerings, and educational resources suffered as a result.2
In Prince Edward County, extreme educational disparities existed throughout the Jim Crow era. Following many years of persistent requests from the black community, the first high school for African Americans was built in 1939 under the Public Works Administration of the Franklin Roosevelt presidency. The school was named for Robert Russa Moton (see p. 25), a native of the region who had risen to national prominence as an educator and black leader.
At the time of construction, the Moton School was one of only twelve high schools for African Americans in rural Virginia. Limited in size by traditional reluctance to fund black education, the building soon became hopelessly overcrowded. Three classes were held simultaneously in the school auditorium and one classroom was located in a school bus. In 1948, three temporary classrooms were built to ease overcrowding and quickly dubbed âtar paper shacksâ (see p. 35) due to their appearance and cheap construction. Built in 1939 for 180 students, enrollment at the school was 477 in 1950.
As the Moton High School was being constructed, state and federal money was also used to renovate Farmville High School for white students. A comparison of the facilities highlighted the inequities of black and white education in the county. Farmville High was a far superior facility that included science labs, a gymnasium, and a cafeteriaânone of which existed at the Moton School.
The first branches of the NAACP in Virginia were established in the 1910s, and were among the first in the South. In the 1930s and 1940s, the NAACP pursued a policy of legal challenges to the inequities that permeated segregated education. The long legal battles produced a modicum of progress. In Virginia, court challenges led by lawyer Oliver Hill prodded the state toward educational equality within segregation, leading to improvements in black teacher salaries, school facilities, curricula, and transportation. Even with favorable court rulings, however, implementation of equality was difficult to achieve. In one case, a county school board in Virginia dropped classes in chemistry, physics, biology, and geometry from the white high school curriculum rather than expend more funds on black education.3
In Prince Edward County, the extreme educational disparities continued. Members of the Moton Parent Teacher Association (PTA) made numerous, unsuccessful appeals to the school board for a new building, but their requests were ignored. In early 1951, the all-white board instructed the black PTA members to stop attending board meetings and to submit no further requests.
As the NAACP battled in the courts for school equality, a new approach emerged from students. During and after World War II, students participated in boycotts, protests, and marches protesting the inequities of Jim Crow education in more than two dozen cities in both the North and South between 1943 and 1953.4 In the spring of 1951, this movement found voice in Prince Edward County under the leadership of Barbara Rose Johns (see p. 42), a sixteen-year-old student at Robert R. Moton High School. The push for better educational opportunities for the black children of Prince Edward was now on the shoulders of a younger generation, whose actions would bring about the NAACP lawsuit for school desegregation in the county, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (see p. 55).
NOTES
A Little Child Shall Lead Them
Bob Smith
1965
Journalist Bob Smith wrote the first book-length account of the school desegregation crisis in the county, They Closed Their Schools: Prince Edward County, Virginia, 1951â1964. Published in 1965, the account was based on dozens of visits to the county and numerous interviews as the school closing crisis took place. The book served as the principal work on this subject for nearly fifty years. In this selection, from chapter 2 of the book, Smith discusses the life of Moton High School student Barbara Johns in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Barbara Rose Johns had roots deep in Prince Edward County. Her grandparents and parents all had been born there. Her father, a solid, silent man, owned land in the Darlington Heights section. Her uncle, the Reverend Vernon Johns, preached there when he was not off preaching somewhere else, denouncing the country Negroes who filled the churches where he spoke for their impenetrable docility, for not caring enough.
Barbara was born in New York City. Her mother and father had hoped to get away from the farm and the slow, rural existence with its drab promise for the future. . . . When Barbara was fourteen months old, the family moved back to the county and then, in 1942, to Washington, where her mother, Violet Johns, had found work with the government. Robert Johns entered the army that year, and the next year Barbara was moved back to the county to live with her grandparents. She was enrolled in Public School 14, a one-room school set in a patch of pine.
Barbara feels that she was protected from the realities of life during this time. She remembers no personal experience of color in her early years, but at night she and occasionally one of the more venturesome of her three younger brothers and one younger sister would slip out of bed to the door of the room where the family was gathered around talking: âYou could hear stories about slavery and about the way Negroes were living in the old days. I donât know about whether any of this was real experience for them or what, and I know none of them actually had been slaves of course. . . . But I remember stories. . . . There was one story about a young white woman with this particular horse that she wanted groomed just right. She would come out and wipe a clean white cloth across the horseâs body to see if it got any dirt. If it did the slave got whipped. . . . I remember that the story ended, and I know it sounds mean, but I always felt glad somehow. . . . Anyway the way it ended the horse threw her and she died. . . .â
In 1945 Barbaraâs father got out of the army and her mother left her job in Washington to return to the county. Violet Johns had an opportunity to see more of her ten-year-old daughter. She remembers that âBarbara was sort of strange, sort ofâdeep. I donât know. Anyway she would play for a while and then she would stop just as abruptly. I guess you could say that she was selfish. . . . She liked to be by herself quite a bit and she thought that a lot of the things other kids were interested in were silly. . . .â
Before he had gone into the army, Robert Johns had operated a general store owned by Vernon Johns in a section of Darlington Heights, in which Negro farmers predominated. When he came out, Robert took over the store entirely. Despite the nature of the immediate neighborhood, the clientele was thoroughly mixed. White farmers were regular customers, white salesmen were regular visitors. Mrs. Johns remembers having difficulty adjusting back from the manners of Washington to rural Virginia: âPeople used to come in and I used to get so angry that they would . . . call you by your first name. âViolet, how about thisââand that kind of thing. I would tell them I thought only my personal friends called me by my first name. We used to have a verbal fight almost every day with some salesman or another.â
She remembers when Barbara was quite small that a white boy came into the store and asked for âUncle Robertâ and that she had to explain to her daughter that her father was not really the little boyâs uncle.
When Barbara was twelve and thirteen she worked in the store, waiting on customers, when school was out. Of the job, she recalls, âI used to feel proud that I was able to give this service rather than go to them for service. . . . My father was on good terms with all the whites around. . . . They would come, some of them, and sit around and play cards. . . . Well they were all poor dirt farmers, you know, and it didnât matter much to them . . . one white farmerâs wife used to come over and talk and sit. . . . I remember she had a daughter and I used to think she was such a beautiful girl. She went to Farmville and got a job in the five and ten and I came in one day and she just turned away. . . . All the times we had talked and just this little thing turned her head. . . .â
Barbara seethed, but smothered her flame. If she erupted at all, it was privately, in something she wrote down, or in brief, savage outbursts of anger. Mostly, she internalized her revenge. Years later, she wrote: âI remember as a youngster getting a special surge of pride out of discovering that the superior white man wasnât too superior after all. This came from visiting the Roseâs and Newberryâs five- and ten-cent stores in Farmville and finding out that the salesgirls couldnât count worth a darn. Example: I remember getting several (say five) 10-cent items and one 19-cent item. Instead of figuring 69 cents right off the bat, she got pencil and pad and wrote a list of five 10- and one 19-cent items and then added it up to be 79 cents. I asked her to recheck and she came up with 59 cents. Instead of taking advantage of her ignorance I got a greater kick from taking each item and counting them correctly out for her and seeing her face turn a crimson red and muttering âOh, yes, thatâs right.â â . . .
Barbara read incessantly. Her mother remembers occasions when she searched the grounds and the house proper for her daughter only to find her, at last, perched in the attic with a book. She read Booker T. Washingtonâs Up From Slavery and remembered Washingtonâs gentleness and the way in which he refused to picture the white man as cruel but instead showed how white and Negro depended upon each other. She read Little Women and Little Men and, not much later, Richard Wrightâs Native Son. She even tackled H. G. Wellsâs Outline of History from her Uncle Vernonâs library. Barbara read, and her grandmother Croner was impressed: âShe was quiet, serious, Barbara was . . . didnât seem to want to get out much . . . seemed she had to do a lot of thinking and studying. She read good books, didnât fool with any of these funny books. . . . Then, too, there were people who influenced her. Vernon Johns was often in the home and you know she didnât get nothing but encouragement from him to do better. . . .â
Her mother, too, saw Barbaraâs frankness as another link between her daughter and the Johns side of the family. She could not get Barbara to attend church regularly. . . . Her daughter âhad a temper and she was sort of . . . stubborn, and anything she believed in she was determined to continue to believe in and if you wanted to change her mind you had to give a lot of reasons. . . . She was very outspoken, a little like her Uncle Vernon in that respect.â
Barbara considers that her life began to change when she entered R. R. Moton High School. Her classmates remember her during her freshman and sophomore year...
