A Fitting Site for an Overdue State Memorial

The News & Advance
Published: July 24, 2008

Monday in Richmond was a day many people thought would never come: the day a monument was dedicated on the grounds of the state Capitol to honor the foot soldiers on the front lines of the civil rights battles of the 1950s and 1960s.

Upwards of 4,000 spectators gathered on the grounds of the Capitol for the dedication that brought people from far and wide. It, perhaps, is the ultimate irony that the Capitol itself was designed by a slaveowner, Thomas Jefferson, and was the seat of the power of the politicians who voted in the policy of Massive Resistance in 1958 rather than obey the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to integrate the state’s public schools.

In 1951, a group of black students at Robert R. Moton High School in Farmville, led by Barbara Johns, decided to take a stand against the Prince Edward County School Board. Their high school was little more than a large shack, compared to the school for white children in the county. Johns exhorted her fellow students and their parents to embark on a strike in hopes of compelling the board to action.

The students’ determination and sincerity attracted the attention of two of the country’s top civil rights lawyers based just up the road in Richmond, Oliver W. Hill Sr. and Spottswood Robinson. They were looking for school segregation cases across the South to begin the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s frontal assault on segregation.

The case of the Moton students eventually was wrapped up into the handful of cases from across the South that became Brown v. Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court unanimously declared an end to the legal doctrine of “separate but equal.”

“Separate but equal” was dead, but the struggle for equality before the law, in public life and in school wasn’t won overnight.

A famous phrase, though, from Chief Justice Earl Warren’s decision — “with all deliberate speed” — signaled that the implementation of the decision wouldn’t occur overnight. President Dwight Eisenhower had to send federal troops to Little Rock, Ark., to ensure the safety of black children integrating that city’s white schools.

Many public school systems in Virginia chose to close rather than integrate. In Prince Edward County, white parents founded Prince Edward Academy, a de facto public school, for their children in 1959 while black children were forced to fend for themselves for five years with no schools.

The civil rights struggles of the 1960s seem so far away in time for many Virginians today; we don’t see video of police turning fire hoses or unleashing police dogs on peaceful marchers demanding their rights under the Constitution. The Ku Klux Klan doesn’t come in the dead of night and drag “uppity” black Americans from their homes to be lynched for trying to register to vote.

That doesn’t mean American society doesn’t have a long way to go to achieve racial harmony in the land. All people — all colors, all races, all ethnicities — need to better understand each other if the sacrifices of a few teenagers 67 years ago in Farmville is to mean anything.