THE ROBERT RUSSA MOTON MUSEUM, INC.: A CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF CIVIL RIGHTS IN EDUCATION

What happened in Prince Edward County?
Prince Edward County may be most widely known for having closed its public schools for five years (1959-1964) rather than desegregate them. But in fact, Prince Edward people have made education history before and since those years.

The Student Protest
Arguably, the most important date in Prince Edward history is April 23, 1951. On that Monday morning, Barbara Johns, sixteen-year-old niece of civil rights pioneer Rev. Vernon Johns, led the 450 students at all-black Robert R. Moton High School out of their classes in a two-week strike to protest separate and very unequal educational conditions. The school, built in 1939 and named for a distinguished educator and president of Tuskegee Institute (1915-1935), was designed to house 180 students. By the late '40s, Moton School was massively overcrowded. Rather than build a new black high school, the county school board erected three large plywood buildings adjacent to the school. These "tar paper shacks" symbolized for Moton students their unequal facilities and sparked their protest demanding a new black high school.

National Impact
A few weeks later, the NAACP entered the picture and brought a suit, Davis v. Prince Edward, demanding not a separate-but-equal black high school, but the desegregation of the public schools. This suit, eventually bundled with four similar cases from elsewhere in the country, was part of Brown v. Board of Education (1954, 1955): generally considered the most important case decided by the U. S. Supreme Court in the twentieth century. In that case, the Court held that racially segregated public schools are inherently unequal and, therefore, unconstitutional. Because the Prince Edward case was one of the two earliest of the five Brown cases and because it was the only one initiated by a student protest, the 1951 strike at Moton High School is seen by some as the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.

Virginia's Response: The Closing of the Schools
Virginia's policy of "massive resistance" to court-ordered desegregation took its most destructive form in Prince Edward County. In 1959, the county board of supervisors abolished public education rather than allow black and white students to go to school together. The vast majority of the county's 1,700 African-American students went without formal education for the next five years - students whom historians have labeled "the crippled generation."

Restoration of Public Education
Throughout the fifties and sixties, the racial battles in Prince Edward were fought almost entirely in the courts, culminating in a second Supreme Court ruling, Griffin v. Prince Edward, in 1964, in which the court forced local authorities to fund public education and to reopen the schools. Though the public schools were almost all-black and poorly funded in the early years after 1964, during the last two decades of the twentieth century, the local white community returned to strong support of public education. As a result, by the beginning of the new century, 90 percent of all children in Prince Edward attended the public schools, now a strong, vital system. In 1994, a reporter for New York Newsday, visiting all five areas involved in the Brown decision forty years earlier, wrote that only Prince Edward County had successfully desegregated its schools and had become "a model for the nation."

What is the Moton Museum?
In August 1998, the Moton building was designated a National Historic Landmark -- formal recognition that the 1951 strike was of historic significance to the entire nation.

The heart of the museum will be the stories of the people who actually lived through the struggles of the 1950s and '60s - told on videotape or in person. Exhibits will focus chiefly on the conditions at the Moton High School before 1951, the historic student strike, and the judicial battle for school desegregation through the Brown decision of 1954 and 1955. There will also be personal profiles of individuals involved in the struggle for desegregation: Vernon Johns, Barbara Johns and other student leaders, Rev. L. Francis Griffin, and the lawyers who led the NAACP assault on "separate but equal" public schools.

A Grassroots Movement
From 1953 to 1959 and again from 1964 to 1995, the historic Moton High School building served as an elementary school. In 1995, when the county had no further use for the building, a grassroots movement led by the Martha E. Forrester Council of Women began to convert it into a civil rights museum. In 1997, by an autonomous board of directors of the Robert R. Moton Museum, Inc. was created. In 1996, Congress appropriated $200 thousand and directed the National Park Service to draw up a plan to develop a museum. That document, developed over three years, calls for "progressive, balanced growth" across four phases.

The Commemoration
On April 23, 2001, the Moton Museum and the entire Prince Edward community commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the student strike at Moton High School and, formally, open the Moton Museum for regular hours.