On April 23, 1951, Barbara Johns, then a sixteen-year-old high school student, led her classmates to strike in protest of the substandard conditions at Robert Russa Moton High School. Her idealism, planning, and persistence ultimately garnered the support of NAACP lawyers who took up her cause and the cause of creating more equitable conditions for Moton High School in Virginia.
After meeting with the students and the community, lawyers Robinson and Hill filed their case, Davis v. Prince Edward, at the federal courthouse in Richmond, Virginia. In 1954, the Farmville case became one of five cases that the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, the landmark ruling that school segregation was unconstitutional.
