ABSTRACT
The 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 2004 connected two contrasting moments of ideological conflict and struggle over the meaning of race. In 1951, 16-year-old Barbara Johns and her classmates at Robert Russa Moton High School decided they could no longer tolerate conditions in their segregated rural Virginia school, where overcrowding had grown so bad that classes were held on school buses and in tarpaper shacks set up in the schoolyard. Johns hatched a plan to distract the principal while the students assembled in the auditorium; they soon voted to go on strike and walk off the campus. Their actions won the support of their parents and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, resulting in a desegregation lawsuit that became of one of the five cases reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court under the Brown decision. Twelve years before the March on Washington brought the civil rights crisis fully onto the national agenda, Johns and her fellow students put the experiences and struggles of young people of color at the center of a national effort to restructure longstanding policies and social norms. They confronted the prevailing framework, which justified and naturalized the idea that state and society had few obligations to educate and support black youth. Though the local district fought desegregation efforts relentlessly during the next two decades, John's activism was to be repeated in countless communities as young people joined social movements for democracy and justice (Wormser, 2003).
