The Robert Russa Moton Museum is committed to the preservation and positive interpretation of the history of civil rights in education, specifically as it relates to Prince Edward County and the role its citizens played in America’s struggle to move from a segregated to an integrated society.
The Museum will be operated to promote positive discussion of integration and to advance the positions that ensure racial harmony.
The 1951 student strike at Moton High School “set in motion events that forever changed the landscape of American education, and arguably marked the start of the modern civil rights movement.”
–Don Baker, *The Washington Post Magazine*, Mar. 4, 2001, p. 10.
“If . . . you are looking for the handful of places where this nation’s civil rights revolution began, check out the old Moton High School in Farmville, Va.”
–The Toledo *Blade* (editorial), Feb. 14, 2000.
The Moton High School is recognized today as a nationally significant site in the history of the civil rights movement. It was the site of a conflict over the essential issue of equal education for all American
s. This student-organized strike that occurred at the school in April 1951 led to the federal court case, Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, which was heard by the Supreme Court of the United States as part of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case.
The decision on this matter, formulated in Brown I (1954) and Brown II (1955), stands today as one of the most important actions of the high court, ruling that separate educational systems are inherently unequal and that all jurisdictions must cease to permit segregation with their schools.
