Today is an important anniversary.
75 years ago, on April 23, 1951, in Farmville, VA, Barbara Johns led a walkout of her segregated high school to protest the unfair and deplorable conditions of her school.
What?! You don’t know who Barbara Johns was?
She led her walkout more than 4 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus, and before MLK, Jr. embraced nonviolence as the way to equality. After she and her classmates turned the rural town of Farmville upside down . . .
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she called in the NAACP.
The NAACP took their case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Barbara and her classmates became plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case that ended segregation in America. Their case was combined with cases from other states.
OK. Why wasn’t she given credit for her role as an early leader in the Modern Civil Rights movement and one of the first to use nonviolence as a means of achieving racial equality?
It's 2026, so people probably know the answer.
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Taylor Branch, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, argues that Barbara wasn’t given credit because she was a child.
I’ll add that she wasn’t recognized because she was a girl, poor, and black—what scholars call the “triple invisibility.”
I believe I am still the author of the only book written about Barbara Johns.
Today there are monuments and museums in her honor.
But when I started writing this book in 2021 (wait, what??? that long ago!)
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. . .nobody knew who she was and her family was afraid to talk to me because so much violence had come their way. After the NAACP took up the case, the family home was burned down.
A cross was burned in front of the school, and Barbara was sent south to Alabama to live with her uncle for her safety. (Wait? South? For safety?? Yup.)
I could write a book about the experience of going through Virginia trying to get the information for this book.
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People finally trusted me enough to pull letters and photographs out of closets and attics. I met a lot of people and learned more than went into the book.
Now the Moton Museum celebrates Barbara Rose Johns Day.
One day I won’t be the author of the only book about Barbara Johns, but I will always be the author of the first book.
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Scholastic Magazine asked me to write an article about Barbara. You can read it here:
https://terikanefield.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/imagine-this-was-your-school.pdf
And now I hope you all have a wonderful Barbara Johns Day.
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Bei mir zeigt er an. Habe die PDF gespeichert.
Werde mir den Text allerdings automatisch in deutsch übersetzen: Es ist eine sehr interessante Geschichte. Ganz herzlichen Dank Teri!
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With me he shows. Have saved the PDF.
However, become automatically translated to me in German: it is a very interesting story. Thank you Teri!
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Ah:
In meiner Heimatstadt gibt es regelmäßig einen
"Ruth Tannenzapf-Tag".
Ruth Tannenzapf war kein besonderes Mädchen. Sie war jüdisch. Das war damals in Deutschland ein Todesurteil:
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In my hometown there is a regular
"Ruth Tannenzapf-Day".
Ruth Tannenzapf was not a special girl. It was Jewish. This was a death sentence in Germany at the time:
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Lüdenscheid - Schüler und Lehrer der Knapper Schule haben am Montag zusammen mit Martin Sander vom Gedenkzellen-Verein jüdischer Kinder gedacht, die während der NS-Zeit verfolgt wurden. Im Fokus stand das Schicksal des jüdischen Mädchens Ruth Tannenzapf, das damals Schülerin der Knapper Schule war.
Teri Kanefield
KSHernandez ♊(she/her/they)
Hans
swggrkllr3rd
MUGISHA PHOCIT