David Cline: Yeah, just for the record, for those who are new to this history, could you tell us a little bit about who Barbara Johns was and what was going on in Farmville?

Oliver W. Hill: Yeah. Well, Barbara Johns was a high school girl, and the black high school in Farmville was in really bad condition. And I think they were, you know, in some kind of tarpaper shacks out in back for some of the overflow. And the rain would come in, and they would have dripping water on their desks. Anyway, Barbara Johns kind of organized the students to come up with a protest, and they were going to have a walkout and refuse to go back until the conditions had changed.

And she called my father to come and represent them, because the school board was, you know, upset about all this. And their parents were upset because, you know, they were kind of in precarious positions. And at this time, my father, you know, they kind of had their plates full, particularly—and they thought they had all the cases they needed for this push to the Supreme Court. But Barbara Johns was so persistent and so organized that he just couldn’t resist her. So, they decided to come and at least visit Farmville and talk to the parents. And, by this time, they had started to change their strategy. When they first started attacking segregation, it was on the basis of “separate but equal,” and no southern state had the resources to have completely equal educational facilities for the black kids. And so, that was the vulnerable point. But by this time, they had decided they were going to change their strategy and start to attack segregation per se.

So, in Farmville, that was one of the things he told the parents, because the children organized this meeting with parents and everybody for the lawyers to come in and talk. And one of the things he said was, you know, “This is about desegregation per se, not just about separate but equal,” and kind of let them know what they would be in for. It would be a relatively long fight. [0:20:00] But the community was ready to support it. So, that case, Davis v. Prince Edward County, became one of the cases that was part of the Brown package. I guess it was alphabetical, so it was Brown, led by Brown against Stalling.

John Bishop: David, I’m going to close the file. OH: Okay.
[Recording stops and then resumes] JB: We’re going.

DC: Okay, great. So, that’s the Farmville?
OH: Farmville, yeah.
DC: And that went on for quite some time?
OH: Well, this was, I think, ’52 when Barbara Johns first called him. And it was ’54

before the time the case was finally decided by the Supreme Court. By that time, Barbara Johns, you know, suffered a lot. She eventually had to leave Farmville because of the pressures that were mounting against her. She comes from an interesting family, too. Her father was Reverend—I can’t remember his first name now. Do you?

DC: Vernon Johns was her uncle.
OH: Vernon Johns was her uncle.
DC: Yeah. Her father’s name I don’t remember either.
OH: And Vernon Johns, who was in Petersburg for a while, eventually went down to Alabama, and he was at the church right before Martin Luther King came. So, there’s a lot of connections to Virginia to this early civil rights activity. Although most people think the Civil Rights Movement started in the 1950s, but [laughs] you know, thirty years before, they were starting these cases in the court. In fact, ten years before Rosa Parks, my father’s firm had a case with Irene Morgan, and it was the same kind of story: she refused to give up her seat on the bus. This was an interstate bus, and eventually that case led to segregation on interstate transportation being ruled illegal. Yeah. So, yeah, there were a lot of precursors to Martin Luther King in the fifties.