“THE STATE OF VIRGINIA MEETS BARBARA
JOHNS”
The
state of Virginia has been in the news a lot lately, as well it should be. With the three top elected officers of the
state facing their racist and abusive captivity and with the leader of the
Republican Senate facing the same captivity, it is hard to know what to think
or where to put one’s allegiance.
Except, one thing remains clear – the racism and sexism of Virginia and
the United States continue to endure.
This
is a big anniversary year for Virginia – it is the 400th anniversary
of Virginia’s General Assembly, making it the oldest continuous legislative
body in America. It is no coincidence
that it is also the 400th anniversary of the coerced arrival of
African people to Jamestown, having been captured and forced to become slaves
in the first recorded passage of Africans to America. It is also the 60th anniversary of
Prince Edward County closing all of its public schools in order to avoid
integrating them.
Prince
Edward County (PEC) is in the center of the state of Virginia, and it was in
the center of the civil rights struggle in the 1950’s. Farmville is the small town in the center of
PEC, and PEC is at the northern end of the great Black Belt that forms an
enormous curve back towards the southwest for over 1000 miles to the
Mississippi River and beyond. Along this
belt of African-American population came some of the most dramatic moments of
the civil rights movement in the 20th century. So it would be in PEC,in which a series of
actions there would alter the life of everyone in the USA.
For
all its contrariness, indeed because of its contrariness, PEC has produced some
powerful witnesses for racial justice.
One was Robert Moton, right-hand man to Booker T. Washington and Washington’s
successor at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
Another was the Rev. Vernon Johns, one of the Big Three of black
preaching in the middle of the 20th century, and predecessor of
Martin Luther King, Jr., as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in
Montgomery. A third was Barbara Johns,
niece of Vernon Johns. She was born in
New York City in 1935, but several years after her birth, her family moved back
to PEC to her mother’s family farm, where maternal grandmother Mary Croner
ruled the roost. At Grandmother Croner’s
feet, Barbara would learn about an unshakeable love, a love that was strong and
enduring, a love that would not let her go, no matter what white folk said
about her or did to her. But, she also
learned at the feet of her paternal grandmother, Sally Johns, mother of her
father Robert and uncle Vernon Johns. At
her feet, Barbara learned about justice and courage and dignity. She would later say of Grandmother Johns:
“She had no fear and was not the slightest bit subservient to whites.” From Mary Croner, she learned about the
enduring power of love. From Sally
Johns, she learned about the enduring call to justice.
She
would need both of these dimensions, as she encountered the powers and
principalities of racism and sexism in Prince Edward County in the state of
Virginia in the late 1940’s and 1950’s in the age of neo-slavery. PEC did not even build a “separate” high
school for African-Americans until 1939, named after one of its most
accomplished sons, Robert Moton. It was
awful from the start – though built under the “separate but equal” clause of
the SCOTUS decision of 1896, there was nothing “equal” about it. It was little more than a large shack – no
heating, no place to eat, no adequate facilities. Despite its woeful nature, black students
came. By 1947, the enrollment was twice
the number that it was supposed to hold.
Black parents began to petition the all-white school board of PEC to
obey the “separate but equal” clause and build an adequate, separate school for
African-American students. They received little or nothing for their taxes –
wasn’t Virginia a leader in some earlier movement about “taxation without
representation?”
It
will surprise no one that the school board denied their request many times,
indicating a lack of funds in the budget.
Leading this resistance was the white superintendent of schools, T. J.
McIlwane, son of Presbyterian missionaries in Japan. Indeed, he had been born in Japan. He became superintendent of PEC schools in
1918 and held the post until 1958. He
worked hard to keep neo-slavery in place, never calling it that, of course, but
always working for it. Waiting for him,
though was a 15 year old student named Barbara Johns, and we will engage her
part of the story next week. You can, of
course, look her up, if you want to know more of the story before then. Suffice it to say that it is astonishing!
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