The Girl Who Would Not Be Silent & The Walk to Richmond

This section highlights the 75th Anniversary March and the youth-led liberation movements of Virginia. Next Section focus is South Jersey

On the sixteenth day of December, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-five, a seven-foot bronze statue of a sixteen-year-old girl was unveiled in the U.S. Capitol’s Emancipation Hall. Her name is Barbara Rose Johns, a teenager from Darlington Heights, Virginia. She now stands where a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee stood for one hundred and eleven years. By the grace of God and the stubborn courage of a child, she has become the first teenager—and one of only a few women—in the National Statuary Hall Collection.

The statue, wrought by the Maryland artist Steven Weitzman, shows Barbara standing to the side of a lectern, holding a tattered book high above her head. Her mouth is slightly open, caught forever in the closing arguments of an impassioned speech to her classmates. On the pedestal are engraved the words she spoke that day, words that echo still across the generations: “Are we going to just accept these conditions, or are we going to do something about it?” And a second inscription, drawn from the prophecy of Isaiah: “And a little child shall lead them.”

More than two hundred members of Barbara’s family gathered for that sacred ceremony. House Speaker Mike Johnson called her “one of America’s true trailblazers, a woman who embodied the essence of the American spirit in her fight for liberty and justice and equal treatment under the law.” Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries added, with the weight of history behind him: “The Commonwealth of Virginia will now be properly represented by an actual patriot who embodied the principle of liberty and justice for all, and not a traitor who took up arms against the United States to preserve the brutal institution of chattel slavery.”

The placement of this statue was no accident of politics, but a providential alignment. It came exactly five years after Virginia’s Commission on Historical Statues voted unanimously to recommend Barbara as the replacement for Lee—a recommendation made during a national reckoning over Confederate monuments following the murder of George Floyd. And it came just months before the seventy-fifth anniversary of the very event the statue commemorates: the student strike at Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia, on April 23, 1951. A child shall lead them, indeed. But where did she lead? And will we, the grown, have the moral courage to follow?

A Walkout That Changed America

To understand what Barbara Rose Johns did, one must first understand the world she refused to accept—the world that the love of God demands we never accept again.

In 1951, Prince Edward County, Virginia, operated two separate and profoundly unequal school systems. The white high school was a modern brick building with a gymnasium, science laboratories, a cafeteria, and a library. It was a place where young minds were nurtured in comfort and dignity. The Black high school—Robert Russa Moton High School—was a building originally designed for one hundred and eighty students but serving more than four hundred and fifty. To accommodate the overflow, the county had erected temporary structures: free-standing tar-paper shacks with potbelly stoves for heat, no indoor plumbing, no cafeteria, no gymnasium, and no science labs. Children kept their coats on all day to stay warm. They studied without books while their white peers studied with every advantage. This was not merely inequality. It was a sin against the image of God in every child.

Barbara, the niece of the great civil rights pioneer Rev. Vernon Johns, later wrote in an unpublished memoir about the moment she decided to act. She had brought her concerns to a teacher, who replied: “Why don’t you do something about it?” At first, she felt dismissed. But then the Holy Spirit, working through that teacher’s offhand words, planted a seed. She gave the idea more thought. She prayed. And then she moved.

She secretly organized the student council. They planned for weeks, keeping their conspiracy hidden from teachers and administrators—for even the adults had grown too fearful to act. On the morning of April 23, 1951, Barbara gathered all four hundred and fifty students in the auditorium. She gave a speech—the speech now frozen in bronze in the U.S. Capitol—and then she led them out the door. “We would make signs,” she wrote, “and I would give a speech stating our dissatisfaction and we would march out [of] the school and people would hear us and see us and understand our difficulty and would sympathize with our plight and would grant us our new school building and our teachers would be proud and the students would learn more and it would be grand.”

The strike lasted two weeks. In that time, the students sought counsel from Rev. Francis Griffin, a Farmville civil rights leader known as “The Fighting Preacher,” who put them in contact with NAACP lawyers Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson. Hill and Robinson agreed to represent the students on one condition: that they challenge the very system of segregation, not merely demand a new building. The students, with the fearless faith of youth, agreed.

The lawsuit—Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County—became one of the five cases consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education. When the Supreme Court issued its unanimous ruling on May 17, 1954, declaring segregated schools unconstitutional, the students of Moton High School had provided the legal foundation. Prince Edward County residents made up seventy-five percent of the plaintiffs in the Brown decision. A little child led them, and the highest court in the land was forced to listen.

But victory was not immediate. The powers of this world do not surrender easily. Virginia launched “Massive Resistance”—a coordinated campaign of state laws designed to prevent integration. Prince Edward County went further than any other jurisdiction in the nation: rather than integrate, the county closed its entire public school system for five years, from 1959 to 1964. Thousands of Black children received no formal education during those years, unless their families, churches, and community organizations—including Quakers and the NAACP—created alternative schools in basements and converted bus garages. The sin of segregation gave way to the sin of abandonment.

Barbara herself was sent away from Virginia for her safety, living with relatives in Alabama to finish her schooling. She later attended Spelman College, graduated from Drexel University, and worked as a librarian for the Philadelphia Public Schools. She married the Rev. William Powell, raised five children, and died in 1991 at the age of fifty-six. “We knew her as Barbara Powell: minister’s wife, mother, librarian,” her daughter Terry Harrison said at the statue unveiling. “But the core of who she was as a sixteen-year-old remained. She was brave, bold, determined, strong, wise, unselfish, warm and loving.”

Justice High School: A 21st-Century Youth-Led Liberation

Sixty-six years after Barbara’s strike—and just eight years before this writing—a different sort of youth-led rebellion emerged from the same Virginia soil, this time in Fairfax County. In 2017, after years of intense student-led pressure, the Fairfax County School Board voted 7-4 to rename J.E.B. Stuart High School—named for a Confederate general—to Justice High School. The new name honored three champions of civil rights: Justice Thurgood Marshall (the first Black U.S. Supreme Court Justice), Colonel Louis G. Mendez, Jr. (a Latino military veteran and educator), and Barbara Rose Johns herself.

J.E.B. Stuart High School was named in 1959—the very height of Virginia’s “Massive Resistance” to school desegregation. The naming was an act of defiance: a deliberate celebration of a Confederate general who lost at Gettysburg but won in the white imagination of Northern Virginia. For years, students—many of them immigrants from El Salvador, Ethiopia, Vietnam, and Korea, attending one of the most diverse schools in the Commonwealth—protested the name. They organized walkouts, gathered petitions, and testified before the school board. Notable alumni, including actress Julianne Moore, joined the call.

The school updated its mascot to the Wolves (replacing the Confederate-tinged “Raiders”), and the renaming cost was partially funded by community donations before the district covered the remainder. The school remains in Falls Church, still one of the most diverse schools in the area, now bearing a name that reflects its students’ values rather than its architects’ racism.

Why does this matter for us, as Quakers in South Jersey? Because Justice High School is proof that youth-led, multiracial coalitions can dismantle the symbolic architecture of white supremacy. But symbolism without structural change is insufficient. The students who renamed the school still attend a school system that remains internally segregated by tracking and gifted-program admissions. The struggle continues.

Join the 75th Anniversary March – 40 Miles for 40 Acres

On April 23, 2026—exactly seventy-five years after Barbara Johns led her classmates out of Moton High School—Reverend Dr. Robert Turner will lead a different kind of march. This one will begin in Farmville and end at the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond, a distance of approximately sixty-five miles. It is called the 40 Miles for 40 Acres campaign, and it is a demand for reparations. It is not a demand born of anger alone, but of holy justice.

The name carries the weight of sacred history. “Forty acres” refers to the unfulfilled promise of General William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15, issued in January 1865, which set aside confiscated Confederate land for former enslaved people in forty-acre plots. That order was revoked by President Andrew Johnson later the same year, and the land was returned to its former Confederate owners. The promise was made before God and the nation, and then it was broken. The phrase has since become shorthand for the unfulfilled debt owed to Black Americans for centuries of unpaid labor, stolen land, and state-sanctioned violence. It is a debt that compounds with every year it goes unpaid.

Reverend Dr. Turner, a minister, teacher, and scholar of African American history and culture, has spent decades building the intellectual and spiritual framework for reparations. The 40 Miles for 40 Acres march is not a symbolic gesture; it is a direct action. It is a pilgrimage through the landscape of Virginia’s racial history—from the site of the student strike that helped end school segregation to the seat of the state government that enacted Massive Resistance to keep it in place. Every step is a prayer. Every mile is a lament. Every hour is a call to repentance.

The seventy-fifth anniversary of the Moton strike is also the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Robert Russa Moton Museum, which preserves the history of the strike and its aftermath. The museum is currently being considered for UNESCO World Heritage status, a recognition that the events sparked in Farmville have global meaning for human rights and educational equity. But Reverend Dr. Turner’s march insists that commemoration without compensation is incomplete. The statue of Barbara Johns in the U.S. Capitol is a profound and necessary act of historical correction. But a statue does not desegregate a school. A statue does not restore the five years of education stolen from the children of Prince Edward County. A statue does not pay the debt of four hundred years of stolen labor.

“The work of justice is ongoing,” the Moton Museum reminds us. “Ordinary people, especially young people, hold extraordinary power to change the world.” The question before us now is whether we, the inheritors of that power, will walk the distance that justice requires.

Come and join us. Wednesday Meeting is at 6pm – Wesley UMC @ 1720 Mechanicsville Tpke, Richmond, VA 23223.

The road to Richmond is open. The children are watching. The ancestors are waiting. And the Lord, who is justice and mercy, walks with us. Will you be counted among those who walk?