P. OConnell Pearson - We Are Your Children Too: Black Students, White Supremacists, and the Battle for Americas Schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia

Students in an English class at R. R. Moton High School, c. 1951. The stove that heated the temporary classroom often sent cinders flying.

Not only did the tar paper shacksas everyone called themleak, but their only heat came from woodburning potbellied stoves at one end of each long, low structure. In winter, students sitting near the stoves felt ready to combust, while students in the back of the room wore their heavy coats during class. Hot coals sometimes jumped out of the stoves onto the wood floor, forcing whoever was nearby to scoop them back into the stove before the building caught fire. Students from other schools laughed and said the shacks looked like chicken coops. It was embarrassing. Worse, the shacks didnt come close to solving the overcrowding problem.

Several teachers had to meet their classes in the main buildings auditoriumreally just a big room with folding chairs and a small stagewhere the noise of many classes going on at once was terrible. Plus, the building was designed so that students moving from one wing of the school to the other had to walk through that auditorium, adding to the distractions. Some teachers taught classes in old, abandoned school buses parked beside the building. Others met their students outside unless it was raining.

Barbara and the other students complained about more than the actual buildings. There werent enough books to go around in most classes, and the books the school did have were old, out-of-date, and worn. Classroom equipmentdesks, chairs, blackboards, and the restwas old and worn too. And there were never enough basic supplies like paper or chalk.

Even getting to school was a challenge. Students came late or missed whole days because the secondhand school buses the county provided broke down frequently. Other children had to walk miles from the farms where they lived because the county didnt provide a school bus for them at all. John Stokes and his twin sister, Carrie, were eager to learn. Eager enough to walk four and a half miles along the gravel shoulder of a very busy highway to get to the overcrowded, poorly supplied Moton High School every day, no matter what the weather was like. Four and a half milesat least an hour and a half of walking each wayto get to classes in leaky, temporary buildings. John Stokes commented that the cows he milked had nicer buildings than the students at Moton did.

Imagine the determination it took for a young person to face that kind of discomfort, difficulty, even danger, every day just to go to school. For some students who didnt plan to go to college or trade school, a high school diploma didnt seem worth the terrible effort. Many were tempted to drop out, and who could blame them? Barbara Johns, who wanted very much to go to college, never considered quitting. But the idea of two more years at Moton was depressing, especially when after-school activities took her to other counties and she saw what their schools were like.

Barbara was a good student and a generally cheerful, rather quiet, person. But as much as she liked and respected her teachers and the principal, and as much as she enjoyed learning, R. R. Moton High School was wearing her down. It was wearing everyone down.

At sixteen, Barbara looked younger than her age. She had wide-set, almond-shaped brown eyes; dark, shoulder- length hair; and a big smile that lit up her whole face. She was soft-spoken, but not afraid to say what she thought, and she was comfortable talking to adults, the school music teacher in particular. Miss Inez Davenport made Barbara feel like she could tell the teacher almost anything. One day, when the situation at Moton High School had really gotten to her, Barbara told Miss Davenport just how fed up she was. It wasnt fair, she said, that she and all the other students had to attend a school with such dreadful equipment and miserable facilities.