Barbara Johns’s Graduation Picture

Barbara Johns poses in her cap and gown for her high school graduation picture in 1952. In 1951, as a sixteen-year-old student at the all-Black Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville she led a successful student walkout protesting the inferior conditions at the school compared to the facilities at the all-white high school in town. Fearing for their daughter's safety, her parents sent her to Montgomery, Alabama, where she finished high school the following year.