Barbara Rose Johns Powell (1935-1991)

October 02, 2017 
/ Contributed By: Samuel Momodu

Barbara Rose Johns

Barbara Rose Johns

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Barbara Rose Johns Powell was an American civil rights leader. She is best known as the student who, at age sixteen, led a student strike at Robert Russa Motonย High School (now Robert Russa Moton Museum) in Farmville, Prince Edward County,ย Virginia, on April 21, 1951. The strike led theย National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)ย to file a lawsuit,ย Davis v. Prince Edward County, which would become one of the five cases that led to theย 1954ย Brown v. Board of Educationย Supreme Court decision.

Johns was born on March 6, 1935, in New York City, New York, to Robert and Adele Violet Johns, who were both from Prince Edward County, Virginia. Johns was the oldest of five children. When World War II began, her father joined the United States Army, and her mother took her and her siblings back to Prince Edward County, Virginia, to live with her grandmother, Mary Croner. Barbara Johns worked on the family tobacco farm and in a country store owned by her uncle, Vernon Napoleon Johns, who was an outspoken minister and civil rights activist.

The strike began when Johns, who was sixteen at the time, was a junior at all-Black Moton High School. Johns became frustrated when the county school board refused to build a new high school for Black students or desegregate the white high school. Moton High, built in 1939, could hold only 200 students, and because of the overcrowding, classes were held on school buses and in the auditorium. When parents of the students appealed to the school board for a new school, the board responded by putting up several tar-paper shacks as a stop-gap measure to accommodate the overflow of students. Johns then met with several students who decided to start a strike.

Johns and other students decided to lure school principal M. Boyd Jones away from the high school by reporting that some Moton students were downtown, causing trouble. After Jones left the building, Johns called student leaders to the auditorium, where she described her plans for a strike to protest conditions at Moton High. The students agreed to support the strike.

The strike lasted two weeks. After it began, two Virginia NAACP leaders, Spottswood Robinsonย andย Oliver Hill, filed a lawsuit at the federal courthouse in Richmond, Virginia, to force school board officials to address the overcrowding by integrating the white high school or building a new facility. The case, Davis v. Prince Edward County, became one of five cases nationwide that formed the basis for the 1954ย Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which desegregated all schools across the nation.

Fearing for her safety, however, Johnโ€™s parents sent her to Montgomery,ย Alabama, to live with her uncle, Vernon Johns, and to complete her education. After graduating from high school in Montgomery, Johns attended Spelman Collegeย in Atlanta,ย Georgia, and graduated from Drexel University in Philadelphia,ย Pennsylvania, in 1979. She later became a librarianย in the Philadelphia Public Schools and married William Powell. The couple had five children together.

Barbara Rose Johns Powell died in Philadelphia on September 25, 1991, at the age of 56.

About the Author

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Samuel Momodu, a native of Nashville, Tennessee, received his Associate of Arts Degree in History from Nashville State Community College in December 2014 and a Bachelor of Arts Degree in History from Tennessee State University in May 2016. He received his Master of Arts Degree in history from Southern New Hampshire University in June 2019.

Momoduโ€™s main areas of research interest are African and African American History. His passion for learning Black history led him to contribute numerous entries to BlackPast.org for the last few years. Momodu has also worked as a history tour guide at President Andrew Jacksonโ€™s plantation home near Nashville, the Hermitage. He is currently an instructor at Tennessee State University. His passion for history has also helped him continue his education. In 2024, he received his Ph.D. in History from Liberty University, writing a dissertation titled The Protestant Vatican: Black Churches Involvement in the Nashville Civil Rights Movement 1865-1972. He hopes to use his Ph.D. degree to become a university professor or professional historian.

CITE THIS ENTRY IN APA FORMAT:

Momodu, S. (2017, October 02). Barbara Rose Johns Powell (1935-1991). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/powell-barbara-rose-johns-1935-1991/

Source of the Author's Information:

“Barbara Rose Johns Powell,โ€ Biography, https://www.biography.com/people/barbara-johns-206527; โ€œBarbara Rose Johns Powell,โ€ All About Barbara Rose Johns, http://www.barbararosejohns.com/brief_bio.html; โ€œBarbara Rose Johns Powell,โ€ Public Broadcasting Service, https://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_people_johns.html; โ€œBarbara Rose Johns Powell,โ€ Robert Russa Moton Museum, http://www.motonmuseum.org/biography-barbara-rose-johns-powell/; โ€œBarbara Rose Johns,โ€ Digital SNCC Gateway, https://snccdigital.org/events/barbara-johns-leads-prince-edward-county-student-walkout/; Teri Kanefield, The Girl from the Tar Paper School: Barbara Rose Johns and the Advent of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Harry N. Adams, 2014).

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