Organizing The Strike and Filing Suit
Barbara met with several classmates and they all agreed to help organize a student strike. On April 23 the plan Barbara initiated was put into action. The principal of the school was tricked into leaving by being told that some students were downtown causing trouble. While the principal was away, Barbara Johns forged a memo from that principal telling the teachers to bring their classes to a special assembly. The teachers brought their classes and were surprised to find Barbara Johns standing on the stage. She delivered a speech revealing her plans for a student strike in protest of the unequal conditions of the black and white schools. The students agreed to participate, and on that day they marched down to the county courthouse to make officials aware of the large difference in quality between the white and black schools.
While the strike was being carried out, Barbara and other fellow students sought legal counsel from the NAACP. The NAACP agreed to assist as long as the suit would be for an integrated school system, and not just equal facilities. A month later, the NAACP filed Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County in federal court. The court upheld segregation in Prince Edward County, and the NAACP appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Davis v. Prince Edward County, along with four others cases, became part of the case Brown v. Board of Education. As Davis was the only case in Brown initiated by student protest, it is seen by some as the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement.
Read more about this topic: Barbara Rose Johns
Famous quotes containing the words organizing the, organizing, strike, filing and/or suit:
“Abolitionists were men of sharp angles. Organizing them was like binding crooked sticks in a bundle.”
—Jane Grey Swisshelm (1815–1884)
“The lies fall like flaxen threads from the skies
All over America, and the fact that some of them are true of course
Doesn’t so much not matter as serve to justify
The whole mad organizing force under the billows of correct delight.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“There is a certain class of unbelievers who sometimes ask me such questions as, if I think that I can live on vegetable food alone; and to strike at the root of the matter at once,—for the root is faith,—I am accustomed to answer such, that I can live on board nails. If they cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that I have to say.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?”
—Quentin Crisp (b. 1908)
“Adriana. With what persuasion did he tempt thy love?
Luciana. With words that in an honest suit might move.
First he did praise my beauty, then my speech.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)