The Rotunda

Issue date: 4/29/09 Section: Features

Have you noticed the old building on the corner of Griffin Boulevard and Main Street? Have you ever wondered what that is? It is the home of the Robert Russa Moton Museum, which was founded in 1996 and has been changing ever since. There is so much history behind this museum, which is imbedded throughout the period of before, during and after the civil rights movement. What do you remember learning in history class about the civil rights movement? Talking about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks; discussing Brown v. Board of Education, desegregation and learning about movements in the South, in Alabama and Georgia and other states south of Virginia. But, did you ever hear about Prince Edward County? Did you ever learn about how this county struggled with education for 13 years? The Moton Museum building is where Moton High School held classes beginning in 1939. Black students in the county did not have much of a chance to receive higher education, which is why Moton was established in the first place. During the time before the civil rights movement, conditions at Moton were sub-par to begin with. As time went on, however, the conditions and overcrowding got worse. Instead of building a new black high school as the Parent Teacher Association (PTA) had requested, the board of supervisors built "tarpaper shacks," much like the portable trailers that many current schools have to relieve overcrowding. The building was designed for only 160 students, and by 1951, there were over 400 students enrolled. It got so bad that finally, on April 23, 1951, 16-year-old Barbara Johns held an assembly that led the entire school to walk out in protest of the shoddy conditions and overcrowding at Moton, demanding equal facilities like white students had at Farmville High School. The student walkout in 1951 was just the beginning. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) quickly got involved to challenge segregation. However, integration did not come quickly. The Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision was handed down in May 1954, and Prince Edward County and the state did not follow court orders. It took five years before the court order was mandated. Prince Edward County's response to the order was refusing to fund any public schools because they did not want to integrate white and black students. All public schools in the county were shut down in 1959, never to open again for five long years. Reverend Everett Berryman went through the school closings in junior high and high school. The schools closed when he was in sixth grade. At first, Berryman, his siblings and friends were excited that the schools were closed: "In September, the schools didn't open. We thought it was an extended vacation, a continuation of summer." However, Berryman said, "We started realizing that something wasn't right when we were doing a lot of work on the farm when we were normally in school. Everyone said, 'Oh, it will open second semester,' but it didn't." Berryman went on to attend the Carver Price School in neighboring Appomattox from 1961 to 1963. Between 1963 and 1964, he attended the Prince Edward County Free Schools. Finally, when the county public schools reopened in 1964, Berryman attended the integrated Moton High School from his sophomore to senior years in high school, graduating in 1967. Robert Hamlin, the current president of Moton's board of directors, also attended Moton for a period of time. "I was a student in this building for the 6th and 7th grades and I was going into the 12th grade when schools the county closed all public schools in 1959," Hamlin said. According to Lacy Ward Jr., adjunct professor of political science and director of the museum, "The Moton Museum was established in 1996 by the Martha E. Forester Council of Women, a civic organization. They were instrumental in the original construction of the first Moton High School in 1927, and also with the construction of this building in 1938, with the first graduating class in 1939." The building became Farmville Elementary School until 1995. The building then became surplus and the Council of Women "stepped forward to purchase the building from the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors, then created a separate non-profit which is known as the Robert Russa Moton Museum," according to Ward. The current museum has two rooms serving as exhibit galleries. These rooms were original classrooms, with the original doors on the frames and blackboards still hanging on the walls. However, the collection of artifacts and information is limited. The museum chronicles the history of the movement in Prince Edward County from the time of the walkout in 1951, to the reopening of the schools in 1964 and up to the 1990s, but it is small. There are a few original desks and pot-bellied stoves standing in the rooms. There are white panels with a few photographs and picture captions on each, but what the museum currently has does not do enough justice to the history of Prince Edward County and the 13-year struggle for civil rights in education. This is why Ward, the Moton Board of Directors and others in the Farmville community are banding together to create a massive permanent exhibit for the museum. Dubbed Moton 2011, plans for the exhibit are far-reaching and extensive, attempting to tell the stories of significance and importance from the student walkout of 1951 to the free schools period of 1963 and 1964.

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