Robert Russa Moton High School
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Robert Russa Moton High School
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| Location | Jct. of S. Main St. and Griffin Blvd., Farmville, Virginia |
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| Coordinates | 37°17′28″N 78°23′52″W / 37.29111°N 78.39778°WCoordinates: 37°17′28″N 78°23′52″W / 37.29111°N 78.39778°W |
| Area | 5 acres (2.0 ha) |
| Built | 1939 |
| Architect | Unknown |
| Architectural style | Classical Revival |
| NRHP Reference # | 95001177 |
| VLR # | 144-0053 |
| Significant dates | |
| Added to NRHP | October 24, 1995 |
| Designated NHL | August 5, 1998 |
| Designated VLR | March 19, 1997 |
The Robert Russa Moton Museum (popularly known as the "Moton Museum" or "Moton") is a historic site and museum at 900 Griffin Boulevard in Farmville, Prince Edward County, Virginia. It is located in the former Robert Russa Moton High School, considered "the student birthplace of America's Civil Rights Movement" for its role in providing a majority of the plaintiffs in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case desegrating public schools. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1998, and is now a museum dedicated to that history. The museum (and school) were named for African-American educator Robert Russa Moton.
The former Moton School is a single-story brick Colonial Revival building, built in 1939 in response to activism and legal challenges from the local African-American community and legal challenges from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It houses six classrooms and an office arranged around a central auditorium. It had no cafeteria or restrooms for teachers. Built to handle 180 students, already by the 1940s it struggled to hold 450; the County, whose all-white board refused to appropriate funds for properly expanding the school facilities, built long temporary buildings to house the overflow. Covered with roofing material, they were called the "tar-paper shacks."
In 1951 a group of students, led by 16-year-old Barbara Rose Johns and John Arthur Stokes, staged a walkout in protest of the conditions. The NAACP took up their case after students agreed to seek an integrated school rather than improved conditions at their black school. Howard University-trained attorneys Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill filed suit on May 23, 1951. In Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, a state court rejected the suit, agreeing with defense attorney T. Justin Moore that Virginia was vigorously equalizing black and white schools. The verdict was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and was subsequently incorporated into Brown v. Board of Education, in which the court ruled against the principle of "separate but equal" facilities and mandated the integration of public school systems.
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