R.R. Moton High School

At the former R.R. Moton High School, African American students seeking equal educational opportunities helped bring about the end of legal segregation in American public schools. The school was built for 180 Black students, but on April 23, 1951, it held 450, with some classes meeting in tar paper shacks, leading students to stage a walkout against unequal facilities, course offerings, and buses. Within weeks, they sought legal redress, and the NAACP supported a lawsuit for school integration. That case, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, became part of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which declared that separate but equal had no place in public education. A second Brown-related decision in 1955 ordered integration with all deliberate speed. Prince Edward County then withheld funds for public education rather than integrate, closing all county public schools from 1959 to 1964 until the Supreme Court ruled in Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County that localities must fund and operate public schools. Prince Edward’s fully integrated public schools carry the legacy of this nonviolent student action, which led to three historic U.S. Supreme Court rulings; the site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1998 and opened as a museum in 2001.

Farmville, Virginia · United States