(posted originally at myleftwing.com)
Black History Month was created to fix a blind spot in our appreciation of history. Other blind spots remain, however, one of which becomes especially glaring during Black History Month.
Barbara Johns was among the most important and dramatic figures of the American Civil Rights Movement, yet hardly anyone has heard of her. While teaching social science in an Oakland high school, I took out a five-dollar bill and promised it to the first student who could tell me who Ms. Johns was. More than 90 students, mostly black, tried their best. At the end of the day, I still had the only five-dollar bill I had bothered to bring. Every classroom there bore posters of "black heroes," from Malcolm X to Condi Rice, but Barbara Johns was forgotten.
In 1951, 16-year-old Johns changed American history after she took over her black high school. Johns tricked the principal into leaving campus for a few hours. Then she forged a note from that principal telling teachers to bring their students to a special assembly. Once the school assembled, Johns admitted she had called this meeting to organize a strike to demand their school get the same funding as the white school across town. Some teachers tried to seize Johns, so Johns took off her shoe and pounded it on a school bench. "I want you all out of here," she yelled at the teachers. Some students then escorted all teachers off the premises.
The students shut down the school. They also asked the NAACP to file a lawsuit on their behalf. The NAACP offered to sue, not for equal funding, but for desegregation. Johns and her fellow students accepted this compromise, and their legal case merged with a few others to became Brown v. Board of Education, wherein the Supreme Court finally declared segregation unconstitutional and changed forever the face of America.
Because Barbara Johns was a teenager, she got little fame then for her achievement and is all-but-forgotten today. As historian Taylor Branch wrote in his Pulitzer-winning Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63:
"[T]he case remained muffled in white consciousness, and the schoolchild origins of the lawsuit were lost as well on nearly all Negroes outside Prince Edward County. ... The idea that non-adults of any race might play a leading role in political events had simply failed to register on anyone — except perhaps the Klansmen who burned a cross in the Johns' yard one night, and even then people thought their target might not have been Barbara but her notorious firebrand uncle."
When I told my students about Barbara Johns, they suddenly became much more interested in American history and what we can learn from the examples of the past. They became more interested in American government after seeing that one need not be a voter to have a voice in shaping policies. This empowering effect may motivate some teachers to keep silent about Johns, since teachers like to hold all the power in their classroom, even if it means sacrificing the power to educate. But the real reason most high school teachers don’t teach about Johns is even more shameful: most simply never heard of her.
Taylor Branch told me he believes Barbara Johns gets overlooked because historians would be embarrassed to tell their university colleagues they were researching how a teenager changed history. He believes this peer pressure is why, not only Johns, but other teenagers who played vital roles the Civil Rights Movement are constantly ignored.
Rosa Parks has become a household name for her courage in refusing to give up her bus seat. Few people have ever heard of Claudette Colvin, the 15-year-old girl who did the same thing in the same city several months earlier. Civil Rights leaders in Montgomery had considered building a boycott around Colvin. They abandoned her when they learned she was pregnant, fearing a pregnant black teenager might make blacks look bad were she placed in the spotlight.
This Black History Month, you will hear about Rosa Park’s courage, but you will not hear how she was following the example of a teenager who had the courage to do it first. You may hear about Birmingham’s police using attack dogs on protesters; you probably won’t hear that that campaign was called "the Birmingham Children’s Crusade" because of the age of those who braved the dogs and the fire hoses. Maybe we need a Youth History Month.