2017 MLK Celebration Week

The 1951 Moton Student Strike “marked the start of the modern civil rights movement” and ”forever changed the landscape of American education”.  – Don Baker, The Washington Post Magazine

Farmville, Virginia’s former R.R. Moton High School, now the Moton Museum and a National Historic Landmark, is the student birthplace of America’s Civil Rights Movement.

Led by 16-year-old Barbara Johns, the 1951 Moton Student Strike produced 75 percent of the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision desegregating U.S. education.

In 1959 Prince Edward County closed their public schools for five years, prompting Kennedy’s intervention and the Supreme Court’s 1964 Griffin v. Prince Edward decision declaring “the time for mere ‘deliberate speed’ has run out.”

“If . . . you are looking for the handful of places where this nation’s civil rights revolution began, check out the old Moton High School in Farmville, Va.” – The Toledo Blade

– See more at: http://www.motonmuseum.org/about/#sthash.TbDUfOCZ.dpuf