Overlooked Heroes - Barbara Johns
In 1951, Barbara Johns was a 16-year-old high school student at a segregated school in Farmville, Va. Though the school was designed to hold 180 students, it was massively overcrowded with 450 — the overflow housed in tarpaper shack added to the school. Barbara Johns organized a walkout of her entire student body to protest the separate and definitely unequal educational facilities. A few weeks later the NAACP brought suit demanding the end of school segregation.
This suit, eventually bundled with four similar cases from elsewhere in the country, became part of Brown v. Board of Education. Generally considered the most important case decided by the U. S. Supreme Court in the twentieth century, it held that racially segregated public schools are inherently unequal and, therefore, unconstitutional.
Thousands of young people like Barbara Johns made a stand to integrate lunch counters, community centers, and sports leagues.