Barbara Rose Johns

Barbara Rose Johns was born on March 6, 1935, in New York City, and raised in Prince Edward County, Virginia. In 1951, she was 16 and attending Robert Russa Moton High School, the only black high school, in Farmville, Virginia.

• Moton students faced overcrowding, a dilapidated building without modern facilities, and outdated textbooks. The statue depicts Johns holding a tattered textbook titled, 'The History of Virginia,' and under the floorboards are books by prominent African American scholars and authors unavailable to Moton students.
• On April 23, 1951, she persuaded her classmates to gather in the auditorium. There, she organized a student walkout and strike. The aim was for the school board to agree to construct a new building.
• NAACP-affiliated lawyers Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson represented the students. The case Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, combined with four similar cases, became the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, argued by Thurgood Marshall. The verdict: racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional.
• Johns attended Spelman College and Drexel University. She married, had five children, and worked as a school librarian in Philadelphia for 20 years. She passed away on September 25, 1991.