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On Monday, April 23, 1951, they were ready. Midmorning, John Watson walked to his house six blocks from the school to make a phone call to the principal that would lure him away from the high school campus.

Holding a cloth over the phone to muffle his voice, John Watson pretended to be a white business owner. He told Jones that a pair of students had skipped school and were causing trouble downtown. Other students watched for Jones’s departure, and then ran back to school to tell the strike organizers. The mood was quiet. Notes were sent to all the classrooms announcing an emergency meeting. Barbara had signed the notes with her initials, “BJ”—the same as Principal Jones’s.

Teachers and students entered the tiny auditorium, where Barbara, John and Carrie Stokes, and other student organizers were hidden behind a thick curtain onstage. When everyone had been seated, the curtain parted and Barbara stood at the lectern. The principal was not present.

Barbara announced that the meeting was for students only—not teachers. The strike’s leaders wanted to get the student body on board before the administration learned about the strike. Barbara removed her shoe and smacked it on the side of the rostrum. “I want you all out of here!” she yelled. Most of the teachers complied. They were just as fed up with the wretched conditions as the students. Barbara called on one teacher by name, asking him to leave. Two football players escorted out another teacher. A couple of other teachers pretended to leave and then snuck back in.

As students sat packed into the stuffy, hot auditorium on folding chairs, they listened as Barbara told them that they shouldn’t have to endure Moton High School. In spite of their parents’ urging and black community leaders’ pleas, the school board had not acted to improve the miserable conditions. Nothing would change, she told her classmates, unless they banded together and demanded a new school.

Barbara’s younger sister Joan cringed and slid down in her chair, shocked by the protest her sister was suggesting. “All I was thinking about was the consequences of our actions in this white county,” Joan said later.

Cheers of support rolled through the auditorium like a summer thunderstorm, building to a roar. Students shouted and chanted. In the middle of the assembly, Principal Jones rushed into the auditorium, begging students to return to classes. Barbara suggested he go back to his office—students didn’t want him to get in trouble. After a few minutes, he relented and left.

Barbara called on her classmates to stay out of school until Moton High School was improved. She told them that the Farmville jail wasn’t big enough to hold all of them. As she marched out of the auditorium and out of the overcrowded school, 450 students followed. Some held signs that read: “We Want a New School or None at All” and “Down with the Tar Paper Shacks.” Others went home to their parents to explain what had happened.

Word of the strike quickly spread around town. Griffin, the black preacher who chaired the local chapter of the NAACP, rushed to the school to offer the students assistance. He spent the evening driving the back roads of the county, knocking on doors to talk with parents and building support for the students’ cause.

The strike Barbara led that day would forever change the lives of black children, not just in Prince Edward but across the nation. But no one knew that yet.

FOR NEARLY TWO DECADES, OLIVER W. Hill Sr., a forty-three-year-old black lawyer from Richmond, had been working to end segregation. He had won his first civil rights case as a young attorney in Norfolk in 1940, when the school system was ordered to provide equal pay for black teachers. He and his cocounsel at the NAACP’s Richmond office, Spottswood W. Robinson III, were fighting segregation laws county by county, and at one point, they had seventy-five cases pending before the courts.

After the Moton strike, Griffin urged the students to call the Richmond NAACP. When Barbara and Carrie Stokes, the president of the student body, dialed Hill’s office, he was already familiar with their situation. He had appeared before the Prince Edward County School Board several times in the previous decade to ask that the board respond to complaints about the conditions of the black schools.

At the time, Hill, thin and balding, was busy drafting a motion for a case in southwestern Virginia on behalf of a black student forced to ride sixty miles to attend the only school that served black students in the region. Hill listened to the young women, but dismissed them. “You don’t need representation,” he recalled telling Barbara. “You made your point,” he advised her. “Go on back to school.”

But Barbara, an especially precocious teenager who took after her uncle Vernon Johns, would not be swayed. Determined to get the attorneys’ attention, she and Carrie typed them a letter. “We hate to impose as we are doing,” the young women wrote, “but under the circumstances that we are facing, we have to ask for your help.”

The next day, a Tuesday, the student organizers arranged to meet with Superintendent McIlwaine. As they marched downtown to his office in the county courthouse, white businessmen came out to watch. Instead of meeting the students in his office, the superintendent directed them inside an empty courtroom.

He insisted that the black students’ school was equivalent to the white school and suggested that the decision to build a new school for black students wasn’t his to make. County residents would have to vote on it. When he saw the students weren’t persuaded, the superintendent tried intimidation. Disgusted by what he thought was an adult conspiracy, he hinted that they might be expelled.

They stomped out of the meeting, unsatisfied. The superintendent wouldn’t even look them in the eye. Besides, they had seen what happened when they took what was handed to them.

That day, the students were alerted by the Richmond NAACP office that Hill and Robinson had decided to stop in Farmville the next day to talk with the strike’s leaders and their parents. The attorneys were passing through town on their way to Pulaski County for a meeting about a federal desegregation suit they were preparing to file.

The previous year, the national organization had decided to change direction and was no longer seeking equal facilities. The attorneys had realized that even if they won case after case, black schools would remain inherently unequal. Instead, the NAACP would focus on the wider fight for desegregation—“the whole hog”—arguing that even if they were equal, segregated schools were unconstitutional. The NAACP’s chief counsel, Thurgood Marshall, a close friend of Hill’s from Howard University Law School, saw schools as the entry point for ending all segregation and was looking for a case to take to the Supreme Court. He wanted to challenge the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, which had found that separate facilities for blacks and whites were constitutional as long as they were equal. But it had become clear that whites would never grant equality.

The path ahead was daunting. The NAACP had filed numerous lawsuits in eleven Southern states and the District of Columbia seeking equal facilities. The strategy called for challenging racial segregation head-on in an attempt to have it declared unconstitutional in public schools. Marshall’s mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, a vice dean at Howard University Law School and the NAACP’s first special counsel, believed that if the organization could build up enough small victories in the courts, precedents would be established for the Supreme Court to eventually declare all forms of segregation in education to be unconstitutional.

The NAACP had its first major Supreme Court victory in 1938, when the court found that a black student, Lloyd Gaines, was improperly denied admission to the University of Missouri School of Law. The court ruled in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada that states that provided schooling for white students must give the same opportunity to blacks. Marshall planned to use the precedent to file similar cases and ask for integration.

In 1950, the NAACP won two important Supreme Court cases. In the first, Sweatt v. Painter, the court ordered Heman Marion Sweatt, a black mailman, to be admitted to the all-white University of Texas School of Law. The school had rejected him on the basis of race and suggested he attend a “law school” for blacks in the basement. The court also intervened on behalf of George McLaurin, a sixty-eight-year-old black teacher who had been admitted to the University of Oklahoma, where he was pursuing a doctorate in education, but had been segregated in classrooms, the library, and the cafeteria. McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents had established that the rights of blacks to receive a graduate-level education were the same as whites’.

The NAACP still had not made much progress in opening up secondary education, though its lawyers had already tried several cases that had advanced to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, a federal court in Richmond. Hill, the first black man elected to the Richmond City Council after Reconstruction, was on the lookout for a strong case in Virginia.

OLIVER HILL SR. DIDN’T PICK the Prince Edward County case. It picked him.

“Oliver Hill was in great demand for the whole state. He was the lawyer who was leading the forces for change,” said Virginia state senator Henry L. Marsh III, who became Hill’s law partner in 1961. “He had a full plate of things to do, and he managed to talk to these children on his way to Southwest Virginia.”

The NAACP’s strategy for getting to the Supreme Court was to choose the right cases—cases that were well documented and clearly showed the impact of segregation on black students. In 1950, the organization had filed a lawsuit in Clarendon County, South Carolina, challenging the constitutionality of separate schools.

On the drive to Prince Edward County, Hill told Robinson he would listen patiently to the Moton students’ story, and then he’d advise them to go back to school. The attorneys met the student strike organizers and their parents in the dank basement of Griffin’s First Baptist Church on Main Street. They changed his mind. “He was so impressed with their situation and their determination that he agreed to take the case,” Marsh told me. “You had to be impressed with those kids.”

Barbara told the attorneys that the students refused to return to class in tar paper shacks. The attorneys were pleasantly surprised, and they offered to represent the children if they could get their parents’ support. “We didn’t have the heart to break their spirit,” Hill said later.

There was a catch: the NAACP was interested only in suing for desegregation. This fight wouldn’t be about getting a new school, as the students had sought. It would be about enrolling black students in the white Farmville High School. The attorneys also warned the students and their parents that the fight would be a long, difficult one. It would take years, and Barbara and the other students would never enjoy the rewards. The case would have to be taken through the federal courts before it eventually landed in the Supreme Court.

The students hesitated. They hadn’t intended this kind of fight. They had simply wanted real classrooms instead of tar paper shacks. Did they really want to take it this far? When the organizing committee held a vote, the decision to pursue the legal fight won by only a single vote.

On Thursday night, nearly one thousand parents and students packed into Moton High School for a mass meeting. The NAACP’s attorneys couldn’t make it—they were in Pulaski as planned—but the state NAACP secretary, W. Lester Banks, attended, signaling the organization’s interest in a case. A new school would not bring equality “if it were built brick for brick, cement for cement,” Banks told the crowd. “There is no such thing as separate but equal.”

Parents knew what happened to blacks who challenged racial segregation. Their white employers could fire them or cut their hours at will. The bank loans on their farms were at risk. Most of all they feared violence. Across the South, blacks were regularly attacked or beaten, even lynched, although less so in Virginia. Still, many black parents felt they had no choice but to support their determined children. The case was moving forward.

Two weeks after the strike began, students headed back to classes, as Hill had instructed them. On May 3, Hill, Martin, and Robinson petitioned the school board to end segregation at Prince Edward’s schools, claiming that the board was denying equal educational opportunities to black students. When the school board rejected the petition, the NAACP filed a desegregation suit. Davis
et al.
v. County School Board of Prince Edward County—named for the ninth-grader Dorothy Davis, the first name to appear in the list of students—was filed in federal court with the signatures of parents for 117 Moton students and their families.

Attorney General J. Lindsay Almond Jr. promised that the state would intervene and use its resources to defend separate schools. In Prince Edward, white leaders immediately offered to build a new black school in exchange for the lawsuit being dropped. Black leaders refused the offer. They didn’t believe the promises and supported the new mission to fully integrate the schools. The school board moved ahead anyway. The board directed McIlwaine to apply for a $600,000 loan from the state literacy fund to add to a $275,000 grant the county had been awarded to construct the school, and in July, the board approved the acquisition of land. The $875,000 allocation was more than twenty times the cost of the original school. As the Davis case wound through the court system, county and state officials hoped the new school building would show a history of concern for black education. A state-of-the-art facility for seven hundred students just outside of Farmville, it opened in 1953, two years after the student strike. This new school was also called Moton High School but would later be renamed Prince Edward County High School. When the case went to the Supreme Court, county leaders would argue that the new school had been planned all along.

Barbara never had the opportunity to attend. Concerned about her safety after her life was threatened, her parents sent her to live with her uncle Vernon Johns in Montgomery, Alabama. Accused of mishandling the strike, Principal Jones was dismissed. He and his new wife, Inez Davenport, who was pregnant, also moved to Montgomery, where he joined Johns’s church.