Calling on American youth to improve our national human condition

Keep marching, children- So, here it is, in 2023, and thousands of students across the nation, including in Uvalde, Texas, walked out of schools protesting gun violence, and the callousness and cowardice of lawmakers who do little- and outright refuse- to stop it.

In the Virginia State Capitol Building, a beautiful bronze and marble sculpture of Barbara Johns. In 1951, she and other students led a strike to protest the conditions at their racially segregated school.

Echo history opinion by Cary Clack published in the San Antonio Express-News:  

But let's begin in 1951:  

It’s 1951 and R.R. Moton High School is a dump.

Pre-Brown v. Board of Education, the Black high school in Farmville, Virginia., is evidence that separate isn’t equal. 

All while the white high school across town, Farmville High, has all the resources needed for the education and comfort of its students, but on rainy days at Moton, students used umbrellas to keep dry in classrooms because of the porous roofs.

On April 23, 1951, the principal of Moton High receives a phone call that two of his students are going to be arrested at the bus station, so he leaves to go help them.

It’s a trick, and in his absence a note written in his name is sent to each of the classrooms calling for everyone to gather for a general assembly. Not knowing their reason for gathering, the 450 students and 25 teachers wait for their principal to explain.

But when the curtain opens, standing on stage isn’t the principal but Barbara Johns, a 16-year-old junior, who had manipulated the principal’s absence so she could call on the student body to protest the second-class conditions of their school. 

Barbara Johns (1935-1991)

She asks, then demands, the teachers to leave the auditorium. Those who don’t are politely escorted out by students.

Moton High lacks, among other things, a cafeteria, lockers, a science lab, a gym, and an infirmary. Johns tells her fellow students that since their parents and other Black adults haven’t been listened to by the white establishment, it’s time for the Black students to act.

She called for a strike and leads all the students on a march out of school to the county courthouse and into the offices of the school superintendent. All day, the students demanded better schools.

When their demands are rebuffed, Johns reaches out to NAACP lawyers. In a mass rally, the lawyers warn Farmville’s Black community of the dangers involved with filing a lawsuit, but the students respond that there aren’t enough jails to hold them.

Over the next few months, Johns is harassed. The Ku Klux Klan burns a cross in her family’s front yard. Fearing for their daughter’s safety, Johns’ parents send her to Montgomery, Alabama., to live with her uncle, Rev. Vernon Johns, pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

Now it’s 1963, and the man who succeeded Vernon Johns at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr., is leading a civil rights campaign in Birmingham to desegregate public facilities. King spends Easter weekend in jail. After his release, protests continue but the campaign isn’t capturing the nation’s attention.

That changed on May 2, when Black youth, more than 1,000 and some as young as 6, poured out of 16th Street Baptist Church singing freedom songs. Police used paddy wagons, squad cars and buses to ferry the children to jail. The next day, when another thousand-plus students rolled out of church and down the street, Bull Connor ordered high pressure water hoses, dogs and batons be turned on them.

Birmingham now has the attention of the world.

It’s 2023, and last Wednesday, and thousands of students across the nation, including in Uvalde, walked out of school protesting gun violence and the callousness and cowardice of lawmakers who do little to stop it.

One of the Uvalde students was Jazmin Cazares, a senior at Uvalde High School. Her 9-year-old sister, Jacklyn, was one of the 21 people murdered at Robb Elementary. 

Jazmin was part of what she described on Twitter as a 77-minute sit-in, explaining, “That’s how long it took for police to enter rooms 111 and 112 at Robb Elementary.”

Students have been marching with urgency since the 2018, school shooting in Parkland, Florida., stole 17 lives. The name of the student-led movement arising from that massacre, “March for Our Lives” is an indictment of a nation whose leaders leave children with no option but to march for their lives.

Their marching and activism make many uncomfortable because marching and activism always makes people uncomfortable. Nonviolent protest is supposed to make people uncomfortable.

While imprisoned in Birmingham, Easter weekend, 60 years ago, Dr. King began composing his classic, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” as a response to clergy critical of him and the protests.

“You may well ask,” King wrote, “‘Why direct action, why sit-ins, marches, and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?’ You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.”

And it worked.

Because of Barbara Johns and her schoolmates, their lawsuit was one of the five cases of the Brown v. Board of Education decision in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separate wasn’t equal. 

A statue of Barbara Johns will replace that of Robert E. Lee in the U.S. Capitol.

Because of children marching in Birmingham, city leaders and business owners desegregated public facilities.

There is a direct line between Barbara Johns’ generation and Jazmin Cazares’ generation.

So, walk together children. Don’t you get weary.

Maine Writer calls on American youth to rally our recalcitrant policy leaders and champion a movement to improve our national human condition.