About Us

Before Selma, before Montgomery, there was Farmville, where young people made history. The Civil Rights movement came to Farmville, Virginia, thanks to the courage of students protesting inequality. The Moton Museum’s permanent exhibition, The Moton School Story: Children of Courage, tells the stories of the Prince Edward students who expanded the meaning of equality for all Americans. Farmville Virginia’s former Robert Russa Moton High School, now a National Historic Landmark and museum, is the birthplace of America’s student-led civil rights revolution. Dreamed of by 16-year-old Barbara Johns, the 1951 Moton Student Strike produced three-fourths of the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the landmark Supreme Court decision desegregating U.S. schools. From 1959 to 1964 Prince Edward County closed its public schools to avoid integration. The Supreme Court in Griffin v. Prince Edward (1964) ordered schools to reopen, declaring “the time for mere ‘deliberate speed’ has run