Barbara Johns was a civil rights activist who played a key role in the fight for racial equality in the United States. Born in Virginia in 1935, Johns was a high school student when she organized a student strike in 1951 to protest the inferior education
Barbara Rose Johns Powell was a leader in the American civil rights movement. On April 23, 1951, at the age of 16, Powell led a student strike for equal education opportunities at R.R. Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia. After securing NAACP legal support, the Moton students filed Davis v. Prince Edward County, the only student-initiated case consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring "separate but equal" public schools unconstitutional.