This year also marks the 75th anniversary of an extraordinary case of student activism that helped lead to the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing segregated schools. In April 1951, 16-year-old Barbara Rose Johns organized a student strike to protest the shabby conditions and inadequate education at her segregated Black high school in Prince Edward County, Virginia. The public schools were segregated, and for decades there was no Black high school at all. Johns graduated from Drexel University and worked for many years as a public school librarian in Philadelphia before her death in 1991. For a long time afterward, virtually all the white children went to a private academy that opened when the public schools closed.

Source: Daily Sun April 02, 2026 20:09 UTC