Thanks (Outlook Editor Ben Sparks) for your words and those of Ken Woodley on the Brown decision. One interesting note: Ken Woodley did not mention that one of the five cases that became Brown originated in Farmville and Prince Edward County, “Davis v. Prince Edward County”. You may know it, so I won’t go into many details, except to mention two.
One is that the spark for that particular case came from a boycott of black Moton High School, led by a 16-yearold junior named Barbara Johns. She led the walkout in a dangerous and intriguing scenario. There was great support by the black churches also.
A second important detail: Barbara Johns was the niece of the Rev. Vernon Johns, predecessor to Martin Luther King Jr. at Dexter Avenue Church in Montgomery, Ala. Vernon Johns was one of the “Big Three” of black preaching in the 1940’s and 50’s, joining Howard Thurman and Mordecai Johnson as the most powerful and eloquent black preachers of the time.
One final detail – Prince Edward County was the last county to re-open its public schools after the closure of the schools in Virginia’s interesting decision to close its schools in response to Brown. Thanks again for your good work.
NIBS STROUPE is pastor of Oakhurst Church, Decatur, Ga.
Mr. Woodley replies:
The civil rights movement in the United States was, in fact, born in the Town of Farmville (Prince Edward County), Va. on April 23, 1951—more than four years before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a bus.
Black students at R. R. Moton High School went on strike against separate and unequal facilities that included tarpaper shacks for schoolrooms. The students’ action was an intuitive and effective blueprint of peaceful protest adopted as the civil rights movement grew in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
The student protest indeed led to Prince Edward County’s inclusion as one of the five Brown v. Board of Education localities and is considered by many to have been the most important case in terms of its impact on the legal and constitutional questions culminating in the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision.
The impact that the courage and determination of the African American community in Prince Edward had on public education in the U.S. is perhaps greatest through a lesser-known but no less significant case. Ten years after Brown, the Griffin v. Prince Edward United States Supreme Court decision gave (and still gives) every American child the constitutional right to a public education.
Farmville Baptist Church pastor Rev. L. Francis Griffin brought the Griffin case after Prince Edward County reacted to Brown’s ruling against segregation in public schools by closing its public schools. The Griffin decision ordered Prince Edward County to reopen its schools, integrated per Brown, establishing the nation-wide constitutional right to a public school education.
Since the public schools re-opened much has been happening in Prince Edward to heal those wounds. The former R. R. Moton High School was designated a National Historic Landmark and is now a museum, the Moton Museum, for the study of civil rights in education. Hampden-Sydney College hosted a weeklong symposium in 1999 on the 40th anniversary of the Prince Edward school closings that did much to nurture honest dialogue and healing reconciliation.
In 2003 the Virginia General Assembly adopted a resolution expressing its “profound regret” for the closing of schools in Prince Edward and its role in those closings. Three months later, the Prince Edward County Public School system awarded “honorary diplomas” to those unable to graduate when schools were closed in the county — another healing moment.
It was while I was considering the state’s “profound regret” and the “honorary diplomas” that God (I have no doubt of that) put the idea into my head of state-funded scholarships for those students, now adults, who were locked out of schools during Massive Resistance. If saying “I’m sorry” is good, saying, “I’m sorry and this is what I’m going to do about it” is much better. And if an “honorary diploma” brings healing, giving back the chance to earn a real diploma will bring, as John Stokes (a key student leader in the 1951 strike at R. R. Moton High School) described it, “a balm in Gilead.” I took that idea to the General Assembly and in June 2004 the state established the $2 million Brown v. Board of Education Scholarship Program and Fund with philanthropist John Kluge donating $1 million to the state for the scholarships and legislators approving another $1 million in state funding. More than 200 scholarship applications have been requested, mostly from Prince Edward County residents, and the first scholarships will be awarded in May.
The Holy Spirit resonated every step of the way, as it surely did with those students at R. R. Moton in 1951, and the power behind this lamp lit in the world was, and is, God.
KEN WOODLEY is editor of “The Farmville Herald.”
Send your comment on this report to The Outlook
Please include your full name, hometown and state.
