"Farmville's New Strides in History"
Published on September 24, 2025
A statue of civil rights hero Barbara Johns will be unveiled later this fall to stand in the U.S. Capitol.
by Taylor Reveley
September 24, 2025
When a new statue of civil rights hero Barbara Johns is unveiled later this fall to stand in the U.S. Capitol, it will be a proud moment for Farmville and Prince Edward County.
Johns, whose courage as a teenage Farmville student helped set in motion the Brown v. Board of Education landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision to end school segregation, will join George Washington as the two Virginians chosen to be so honored in the halls of Congress.
The moment will shine a national light on Johns’ home community here. It will be tempting for those telling her story to fall back on the clichéd narrative of an out-of-the-way place experiencing a fleeting and coincidental moment of attention.
The Barbara Johns model. Courtesy of Virginia Department of Historic Resources.
The truth is more interesting and well-known to chroniclers of America. Farmville and surrounding Prince Edward County have been consequential places in American history for centuries, at almost every critical juncture in the story of our nation. The journey of Barbara Johns to the U.S. Capitol fits into a powerful and much larger narrative — and it resonates anew today, as our country again struggles with the perpetual dilemma of how to balance pride in our progress with the hard work of reckoning honestly with painful aspects of our past.
The remarkable variety of people and events in Farmville and Prince Edward who were prominent in the story of American freedom is conveyed by the inscription of the 16-foot Farmville Freedom Monument, a classical obelisk erected by Longwood University in 2018 at a focal intersection for the university’s campus and the town:
“This is America’s first two-college community, with the founding of Prince Edward County in 1754, Hampden-Sydney in 1775, Farmville in 1798, and Longwood in 1839. It is a crossroads of American history, home to Patrick Henry and Barbara Johns, to the people of Israel Hill, the Moton strikers, and the generation locked from public education. This is where the Civil War moved to culmination, and where the Civil Rights Movement took stride for the nation.”
Henry represented Prince Edward in the Virginia legislature. Israel Hill was an extraordinary free-Black community formed long before the Civil War and recounted in Melvin Ely’s Bancroft Prize-winning 2004 book Israel on the Appomattox.
In April 1865, much of the last fighting of the Civil War took place in and around Farmville, the collapsing Confederate Army making one last narrow escape before it was finally cornered two days later nearby at Appomattox. From his hotel on Farmville’s Main Street, General Ulysses S. Grant began his correspondence with Robert E. Lee about surrender and reuniting the nation.
Tragically and poetically, nearly a century later, Farmville was again front and center in what proved to be a fulcrum point in the civil rights movement. In 1951, at the segregated Moton High School, 16-year-old Barbara Johns led her classmates in a walkout, protesting the painfully inferior conditions compared to the nearby white high school. Even more courageously, students and their families agreed to join the lawsuit that was eventually decided in 1954 as Brown v. Board of Education, seeking not merely to demand the “equal” in “separate but equal” but to overturn segregation. The case was named for a parallel suit from Topeka, Kansas, but 75% of the plaintiffs, and all of the students, of the combined case came from Prince Edward.
In the years following Brown v. Board, Prince Edward’s white leadership chose to close the county’s public schools rather than integrate them. They remained closed for five years, longer than anywhere else in America, locking out students until the U.S. Supreme Court at last compelled them to reopen in 1964. Many young people left. Others received schooling from volunteers who came to Prince Edward to fill the breach. While white students had access to a private academy, many Black and some white students simply did not go to school. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy came to Farmville in 1964 to speak at Hampden-Sydney College on the issue and stopped on High Street, in front of Longwood’s campus — though he pointedly had not been invited to speak there — to call national attention to the plight of those locked out of their education.
My family has long roots in education that run through this community for generations, with Longwood and Hampden-Sydney both. In the intensity of these civil rights struggles and afterwards, Farmville and Prince Edward, like the nation, often had difficulty finding a shared perspective.
That has changed here, through good and thoughtful steps year by year. Our community and local leaders, as well as statewide officials — Republicans and Democrats alike — take inspiration from this history, in wide unison today. After the Moton school building was closed in 1995, it was preserved through efforts led here by the Martha E. Forrester Council of Women. In 1998, the structure was declared a U.S. National Historic Landmark, and in 2001, the site became a museum to share the history of the strike, the lockout and court cases that brought change, as well as to promote dialogue.
In 2014, Longwood and the Moton Museum began working toward a partnership. It was a clear and necessary step for Longwood to take responsibility and apologize for its actions and inactions during the civil rights era. Longwood’s Board of Visitors issued a formal resolution of regret. The university also pledged to work with the museum to advance its mission and to expose Longwood students to the history that took place here. Additionally, Longwood established a “Moton Legacy Scholarship,” honoring a student with a demonstrated commitment to advancing equality of opportunity, broadly defined. It has become one of the university’s highest honors.
A year later, in 2015, Longwood and the museum announced a partnership that allowed the museum to expand its educational mission. And in the decade since, thousands of schoolchildren and others have visited Moton. It is the only partnership in America between a university and a civil rights museum.
The story of Barbara Johns is now widely known. It is featured in the Virginia Standards of Learning history curriculum. It was highlighted before an audience of tens of millions worldwide during the 2016 U.S. Vice-Presidential Debate between Tim Kaine and Mike Pence, which took place on Longwood’s campus.
The Moton Museum is also now well advanced in the process of becoming a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in connection with honoring the Southern civil rights movement. It would become one of just two in the commonwealth, joining the paired Jeffersonian architectural treasures Monticello and the Lawn of the University of Virginia.
And soon, on the long list of Virginians who have played a pivotal role in American history, Barbara Johns will stand officially in the first rank, alongside the father of the nation, in receiving the extraordinary honor of commemoration in the U.S. Capitol.
She passed away in 1991, succumbing to cancer; suffice it to say, she would have been amazed. Her siblings and extended family, led by her sister Joan Johns Cobbs, join together for a joyful reunion each year in Prince Edward.
While taking inspiration, our community still, of course, grapples with this powerful history. The legacy of the school closings remains painful; the generation that was locked out of the schools and remembers first-hand those events is passing off stage, while the impact endures. Farmville and Prince Edward have by no means solved the problems of race in American life.
No one, however, could doubt that far more honest conversation and reckoning have taken place here, with the encouragement of the Moton Museum, during these years since the museum began and has built such momentum as took place during the difficult decades following desegregation.
As the Johns statute is unveiled, Americans and Virginians new to the story may discover Farmville and Prince Edward are not quite what they expected. The college-town Main Street of furniture stores, restaurants, arts venues and coffee shops, along with the lovely Hotel Weyanoke, is doing well.
They may also realize the place is not just more important than they realized — but more relevant, too.
The Farmville Freedom Monument celebrates not a destination but a process, by which, incompletely and with hard efforts still ahead, Farmville and Prince Edward have worked toward an acknowledgement of all of our history, the good and the bad, inspiring and shameful. It is possible to honor Barbara Johns, the lawyers who used the tools of democracy to bring about change and the striker generation, along with those who were deprived of public education, while at the same time reckoning honestly with how so many were denied freedoms we now recognize as fundamental for so long.
There are some on one side of our political divide in America today who would make history primarily an exercise in self-flagellation. On the other, there are unapologetic efforts now underway to insist our museums should instill unreflective cheerleading and cannot be trusted to deal with difficult topics. The Moton Museum and the community it serves are proof that there is a better way forward. Farmville and Prince Edward are deeply proud of Barbara Johns and are a better place for having worked to navigate that divide rather than ignore or dismiss it.
The inscription on the Farmville Freedom Monument continues:
“This monument honors all in our community throughout these centuries who have labored and sacrificed to bring forth, in Lincoln’s words, a ‘new birth of freedom.’ It marks also our commitment to honor their struggles by serving as a beacon of education and of leadership forged in reconciliation, and marks our resolve to pass a still finer ideal of liberty to generations to come.”
The importance of Farmville and Prince Edward does not belong only to the past. Today, our community demonstrates how we can celebrate both freedom and the struggles that went into achieving it.
Taylor Reveley has served as president of Longwood University since 2013. His grandfather served as president of Hampden-Sydney College from 1963 to 1977, which Reveley’s father — president of William & Mary from 2008 to 2018 — called home for nearly a decade.
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