Barbara Johns, a civil rights pioneer born in New York who moved as a child to her parents' native Prince Edward County, led a student walkout in April 1951 at age 16 to protest conditions at the segregated Robert Russa Moton High School, where facilities were vastly inferior to those at the county's white high school. The students demanded a new school and sought aid from the Virginia NAACP, which offered to represent them in a lawsuit seeking an end to segregation. Davis v. Prince Edward, the only student-initiated case consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education (1954), helped lead to the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that public school segregation was unconstitutional.
