Now that the list of components for the US Civil Rights Movement Sites Tentative World Heritage Site nomination has filled out, I figured I should write about some of the locations that have yet to be reviewed. I visited the three sites closest to my home on the US East Coast in the summer of 2023. One of the sites, the Lincoln Memorial, was covered quite well in Solivagant's excellent review based on his firsthand experience at the March on Washington. The other two sites, Moton High School and the F.W. Woolworth Store, are a bit further off the beaten track for most visitors. I'll cover Moton High School for this review.

Moton High School is located in Farmville, a small town in central Virginia. Prince Edward County constructed Moton in 1939 as a segregated public school for African American youth in Farmville, but the town neglected the school in favor of funding improvements at the white high school on the other side of town. Moton was overcrowded, shoddily repaired, and inaptly heated for the student body. In 1951, Barbara Johns, a junior (the penultimate year of the US high school system), initiated a student-led walkout from classes, appealing to her fellow students to picket outside the school and the county courthouse to raise awareness of the poor conditions at Moton and to demand change. Of note, they requested to conduct this protest on their own, wanting to protect their teachers who they loved from consequences.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took up the cause of the students, and filed a lawsuit against Prince Edward County asserting that school segregation was unconstitutional. The lawsuit was folded into other lawsuits, including one from Monroe Elementary School in Topeka, Kansas, and brought to the US Supreme Court as the case of Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka. This result of this case at last brought monumental change to the US education system, as the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in 1954 that racial segregation of public schools was unconstitutional nationwide.

States in the American South reacted poorly to the Supreme Court's decision and rebelled against desegregation. Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas was the site of one of the greatest acts of courage in the face of racism, as nine African American high school students walked through an angry mob in 1957 to start classes at the main city high school, paving the way for future school integration in Arkansas. The state of Virginia had a similarly awful response to the Supreme Court ruling, as the state slow-rolled the process of desegregation before several school districts within the state, including Prince Edward County, decided to close all their public schools rather than comply with school integration. Lawsuits ensued, and school districts were forced to comply and reopen; by the mid-1960s, school integration was well under way in Virginia.

I went to school in Virginia some twenty years later, and it would have been very hard for me to imagine how segregated education was in Virginia into the 1960s. Educational television programs like Sesame Street were very helpful for molding the mindsets of me and others of my age when we were growing up, allowing us to appreciate a multiracial and multicultural society and learning environment. But even more so, by the 1980s and 1990s integrated schools were such an accepted part of American society -- at least where I grew up -- that it seemed perfectly natural to study and play sports and participate in clubs with classmates from all races and backgrounds. The students of Moton did not have this experience, but it was through their courage to stand up for change that the US was forced to take notice, and the US education system was changed for the better. Maybe still not perfect, but better. 

Moton High School today is a museum. The auditorium where the students gathered to call for a strike now serves as a theater which plays an earnest local film recreating the events of the walkout. The adjacent rooms contain a replica of the tar paper shacks the students were studying in and number of exhibits explaining the history of the school and its involvement in the Supreme Court cases that brought an end to racial segregation in the US education system. I enjoyed the visit to the museum, and I wish I had known about it when I was growing up, since it had such an impact on education in Virginia. Farmville is not generally on the tourist route for most visitors to Virginia, but it is not too far from Charlottesville, for those World Heritage Site visitors who are visiting Monticello and the University of Virginia. Moton High School can also be combined with a visit to the F.W. Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina, to gain another perspective of the US Civil Rights movement, but that's a story for a separate review.

The inclusion of Moton in the overall Civil Rights nomination contributes to the nomination's overall demonstration of the effectiveness of peaceful protest in effecting change. It does not pass my mind the irony that in today's United States such protests may again be necessary to ensure that hard-fought lessons on diversity, equity, and inclusion are not forgotten. I fervently hope that this nomination continues on schedule despite the current political climate.

As a final note, Barbara Johns, the student who led the school protest almost 75 years ago, is now getting better recognition from the state of Virginia. A statue of Barbara Johns is scheduled to be installed in the National Statuary Hall at the US Capitol later in 2025, replacing Confederate General Robert E. Lee, who Virginia removed from the US Capitol in 2020. It's about time.

Logistics: Moton High School in Farmville is one of those sites that require private transportation; Farmville is about one and half hours from both Charlottesville and Richmond, Virginia, and about three hours from Greensboro, North Carolina.