The original Moton School, located near the edge of the Longwood campus where Griffin Boulevard branches off Main Street, is now a civil rights museum. Visit the museum or read more about its role in local and national civil rights history on the Moton Museum's website.
On April 23, 1951, sixteen-year-old Barbara Johns led a two-week student strike protesting the deplorable building conditions at the Robert R. Moton High School in Farmville, which served the African American community in Prince Edward County. The NAACP took the case to the Virginia courts and lost. It later went to the Supreme Court as one of the cases in the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ordering the desegration of American public schools. Prince Edward County, along with many other Virginia localities, resisted integration and eventually closed the public school system from 1959 to 1964, leaving most of the county's African American children and some white children without formal schooling for five years.
The Greenwood Library's Special Collections Room on the second floor includes a variety of local history materials, including items related to the closing of the Prince Edward County public schools. Here is a sample of titles: