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 generation of the 20’s was truly secular in that it still knew its theology and its varieties of religious experience. We are post-secular, inventing new faiths, without any sense of organizing truths. The truths we accept are so multiple that honesty becomes little more than a strategy by which you manage your tendencies toward duplicity.”
—Ann Douglas (b. 1942)
“The illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean- tide, on which we and all the universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us dumb, for we have no word to speak about it.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“Is not the whole world a vast house of assignation of which the filing system has been lost?”
—Quentin Crisp (b. 1908)
“One year, I’d completely lost my bearings trying to follow potty training instruction from a psychiatric expert. I was stuck on step on, which stated without an atom of irony: “Before you begin, remove all stubbornness from the child.” . . . I knew it only could have been written by someone whose suit coat was still spotless at the end of the day, not someone who had any hands-on experience with an actual two-year-old.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)