"AND A LITTLE CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM"

“AND A LITTLE CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM”

            This week Caroline and I visited the Robert Moton Museum in Farmville, Virginia, in Prince Edward County, on the way to the PCUSA Big Tent in Baltimore.   It has been called “one of the most stubborn counties in the United States.”  Prince Edward County is at the northern end of the great Black Belt that forms an enormous curve to the south and west for more than 1000 miles to the Mississippi River and beyond, where dramas over race and slavery and civil rights have been fought for centuries and continue to be fought.  Farmville is a small, farming city with two universities, and in the 1950’s it would become the focal point of one of the central themes of American history:  race v. equality. 

            Early in 1951, a 16 year old black student named Barbara Johns began talking with a few of her classmates at their segregated Robert Moton High School.  She proposed a boycott of the school until the white school board agreed to spend money to build a black high school equal to the white school.  There had been many demands for this, but the white, Presbyterian school superintendent T.J. McIlwane continued to deny their request.  Johns chafed under this oppression.  She felt that her generation must act, that her parents’ generation, while being loving people, had lost their boldness by living too long under the system.  She felt that they had come to accept the white view that nothing could or would ever change.  As she talked with one of her teachers about the oppression, she told Barbara Johns:  “Girl, you’re always talking about this – why don’t you do something about it.”  The teacher’s comments stung her, but it also inspired her.

            A few days later, she asked a couple of student leaders to discuss a boycott with her.   One of the students remembered that she spoke with a great effectiveness: “She opened our eyes to a lot of things.  She emphasized that while we must follow our parents, in some instances, a little child shall lead them.”  They agreed to join in and recruit a small group of students to lead it.  But, no parents or other adults, because they were afraid that they would squelch it.  Over the weekend of April 21-22, they passed the word:  strike on Monday.  On that Monday, a fake call was made to the principal to come rescue two black students who were being harassed by the police at the bus station.  In his absence, a forged note was passed out to all teachers, under Principal Boyd Jones’ name, calling for a student assembly at 11 AM.  All classes and teachers came in for the assembly.

            The curtain was pulled back on the stage, and there stood Barbara Johns and her two allies, brother and sister John and Carrie Stokes.  Johns began talking about the need to take action. Some of the teachers moved to take over the assembly in the absence of the principal, but student marshals stood in their way, blocking them.  She then invited the teachers to leave so that the students could hear the plea for action and decide what to do.  When they did not leave, she pulled off her shoe, rapped in on the podium and demanded:  “We want all of you teachers out of here.”  Most left, but a few stayed.   Johns spoke eloquently from her heart:  it was time that they were treated equally with white students, time to have a decent high school building, time for the students to take leadership.  Her proposal:  they were going to vote to march out of school then and there and stay out until the white leadership agreed to build a new and equal black high school.  The strike was on, and the students marched out.  It held despite great stress – when Johns got home, she told her maternal grandmother: “Grandma,  I walked out of school today and carried 450 students with me.”

            NAACP lawyers heard about the case through the Rev. Francis Griffin, in whose church the students went for the strike.  Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill came to meet with the students, and they decided to take the case if the students could bring their parents to the next meeting, and if they would all agree not to sue for a separate school but for an integrated school.  These events happened, and the NAACP filed suit in federal district court, where they quickly lost.  They appealed to the US Supreme Court, and in the next year the case, Davis v. Prince Edward County, was combined by SCOTUS with 4 other cases to become Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.  SCOTUS decided unanimously in 1954 that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional, a landmark decision in American history.

            As we all know, the ramifications of that decision are still being fought.  In 1959 Virginia closed all of its public schools rather than integrate them.  Prince Edward County was the last county to re-open their schools, waiting until 1963 to do it, and only then under a direct SCOTUS order, hence its name as the “most stubborn county.” 

            If you are wondering if this is only ancient history, this week not only marks the anniversary of the beginning of the horrendous atomic bombings in Japan but also the 54^th anniversary of the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which ended neo-slavery in this country.  In 2013 SCOTUS went the other way and eviscerated the Voting Rights Act in Shelby v. Holder, coming out of the Black Belt in Alabama.  So, we will need many more Barbara Johns emerging – we’ve seen them in the Parkland students and others, but let us find our place also, no matter whether we are 16 or 96.