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November 10, 2005
The Hidden Civil-Rights Heroes, Black Teenagers
Posted at November 10, 2005 10:36 AM in Race Relations .
Compiled by the DiversityInc staff
© 2005 DiversityInc.com®
November 10, 2005
Black teenagers were taking a stand for their rights even before the birth of the Civil Rights Movement.
Before Rosa Parks' arrest and the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott, teenagers such as Barbara Johns and Claudette Colvin were working to make changes. In 1951, Johns, a 16-year-old student at Moton High School, a segregated school in Farmville, Va., decided to organize a school-wide walkout and two-week strike in protest of the clear difference in educational standards between her school and the white school. The NAACP offered to help this cause if the students agreed to sue for an integrated school, not merely a school equal to the white one. The case was one of five reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court when it declared segregation unconstitutional in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case. [Read More]