Marching their way into history / Museum honors students' push for change

 Monday, August 24, 1998

 BY KATHRYN ORTH

Times-Dispatch Staff Writer
 

FARMVILLE -- When Edwilda Isaac was 13 years old, she helped lead a
march of 400 black students out of their segregated high school and into civil
rights history. The students lured their principal out of the school, sent their teachers to the school library and then marched to the Prince Edward County Courthouse
to protest the decrepit conditions at R.R. Moton High School.

The year was 1951. The school, built in 1939 with the capacity to hold 180
students, was handling 450. Some of them were taught in tar paper shacks,
which were heated by coal stoves and leaked when it rained, built next to
the school.

Isaac said she had no sense at the time that what the students did was a
historic event. They only knew they wanted a better school, she said.
"I was very nervous," said Isaac, who now is back in Prince Edward County, teaching at a public school,integrated in part because of the march. "Even as young students we knew this was a serious thing. But we knew that what we were doing was the right
thing. "

The protest led to a lawsuit against Prince Edward County that ultimately
became part of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Brown vs. Board of
Education decision, which held that racially segregated public schools were
inherently unequal and therefore unconstitutional.

As a result of that decision, the Prince Edward County Board of Supervisors
refused to fund the school budget in 1959 and all county schools remained
closed for five years.

The school where the students organized their protest now is the Robert R.
Moton Museum. It will be dedicated Aug. 31 as a National Historic
Landmark.

Isaac, then an eighth-grader, was a friend of Barbara Johns, who organized
the protest. Johns was the niece of civil rights leader Vernon Johns.

 "Barbara Johns' sister and I had been friends since first grade, so when
Barbara was looking for people at each grade level to spread the word, she thought
of me," Isaac said.

 At first the students were asking only for a new school, with more room and
better equipment. "Barbara knew what other schools had. She had seen schools with
cafeterias and science labs," Issac said. "In the tar paper shacks, coals
would pop out of the holes in the stoves. Everything was leaking. In our
biology classes, we had one frog. The teacher was the only one with a
microscope. Every single book we ever had was a discarded book from
Farmville High School.

 "When you find out there is something better than what you have, it gives you extra courage."

They planned the march carefully. First they lured the principal out of the
building with a phone call, saying there was a student in trouble at the bus
station, who needed the principal's help. Then the students rang the school
bell, a signal to assemble in the auditorium.

"The student leaders were on stage. They asked the teachers to leave, then
we quickly made some placards and marched on down the street. [County
officials] heard we were coming and met us on the courthouse steps," Isaac
said. "At the courthouse I was scared and wondered if they would put us in
jail or listen to us. It was like you jumped on a treadmill and couldn't get off."

Local and school officials asked the students to choose representatives to go
inside the courthouse to present their grievances. Isaac was a member of
that group.

"We went into the courtroom. We had to tell our names and who our
parents were and where we lived. Several of the seniors talked about why
we were there. By the time we were dismissed from there, somebody had
called the NAACP. They probably knew we would need some legal
advice."

Isaac had told her father, Edward B. Allen, about the planned protest. "He
said, 'You have to do what you have to do.' "

But she did not tell her mother, who worked for the county school system as
an elementary teacher.

Vera Allen heard about the march that afternoon, from people who had seen
her daughter marching.

When Allen first saw her daughter and the other students after the protest,
she explains now, "They were all excited, smiling, like they'd done something
big. My first thought was, what we would have to give up. We were very
fearful."

And there were repercussions.

"I kind of knew somebody was in trouble," Isaac said. "My father was
self-employed, so they couldn't do anything to him, but my mother worked
for the county. They did not renew her contract that fall and revoked her
Virginia teaching license. All through my teen-age years, she worked in
North Carolina."

Today, Allen is president of the Martha E. Forrester Council of Women, the
group that has been the driving force behind buying the old school from the
county and turning it into a museum.

 Isaac, after college and work away from Farmville, returned to Prince
Edward County to teach.

Forty years after the student protest, she stood up at a public hearing in that
same courtroom, to speak in favor of a proposed school budget and began
to cry.

"It had not dawned on me that it was the same room until that moment. The
next day, people hugged me and asked me if I was all right, and I had to
explain that I was not really that worked up over a budget," said Isaac with a
rueful laugh.

 Times have changed in Farmville, said George Bagby, the museum's public
relations director.

 "The community, black and white, is working to turn the old high school into
a civil rights museum, designed to celebrate the young heroes of 1951 and
the remarkable progress the area has made."

 When the Moton building is dedicated a National Historic Landmark later
this month, it will join about 2,200 other sites in the country. Most such sites
must have achieved their significance more than 50 years ago, but the
National Park Service waived the rule in this case because of the Moton
school's "extraordinary national importance," Bagby said.

 Isaac agrees. "We need the museum just to remind people that it happened,
and that it should never happen again."
 
Moton Museum DEDICATION: 10 a.m. Monday, Aug. 31.
WHERE: Corner of Main Street and Griffin Boulevard in Farmville.
 INFORMATION:
Call (804) 392-8830
 

© 1998, Richmond Newspapers Inc.

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