Barbara Johns' place in history was memorialized before this week's unveiling of a civil-rights monument in Richmond.

It is Johns who is most associated with the student protest that gave rise to the Prince Edward County lawsuit that became part of the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown decision in 1954 that struck down separate-but-equal education.

In 1951, using a ruse to get the principal out of the all-black Robert R. Moton High School, the students called their own assembly. Then a 16-year-old junior, Johns told her fellow students that it was time to stop accepting the overcrowding, the tar-paper shacks for classrooms, and the lack of books and supplies.

All 450 students at Moton -- crammed into a school designed for 180 -- joined the two-week strike. Attorneys Oliver W. Hill and Spottswood W. Robinson III filed a suit on behalf of the students asking for desegregated schools in the county. That suit, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, became part of the Brown v. Board of Education suit.

Tomorrow's formal dedication of the monument will be emotional, said Johns' younger sister, 70-year-old Joan Johns Cobbs. "I'm very proud of what she did, as well as the other students. It's a momentous occasion. I never thought I would see such a thing in my lifetime. I never thought the day would come when my sister and the other students would be honored for the stand they took in 1951 -- by Richmond nor Prince Edward County."

A cross was burned at the Johns home, and Barbara Johns was sent to live with her uncle, Vernon Johns, in Montgomery, Ala. Vernon Johns was an outspoken civil-rights advocate who preceded the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as pastor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

Barbara Johns finished high school in Montgomery and attended Spelman College in Atlanta for two years before marrying the Rev. William Powell and moving to Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, her former schoolmates in Prince Edward found themselves denied an education for five years. The county's Board of Supervisors cut off funding to the school system from 1959 to 1964 rather than desegregate. A private school was organized for the white students, but the black students were left out. The public schools reopened only after the federal courts ordered it.

Johns, who worked as a librarian, would occasionally give interviews, but she seldom spoke to her family about her role in the protest. She died of cancer Sept. 28, 1991, and it was only after her family discovered her unfinished manuscript that they learned the part she had played.

"I dearly wish my sister could be here to see it," Cobbs said. "But I . . . think her spirit will be here with us."
Contact Jamie C. Ruff at (434) 392-6605 or jruff@timesdispatch.com.