The Museum in My Hometown

History has always seemed daunting to me. I’ve never felt much like a historian, nor known a history lesson that piqued my interest. Recently, I’ve begun to question if this is because of a genuine distaste for historical happenings or a lack of desire to rehash the mess previous generations made in making the world as it is today. Perhaps it is the content of the lessons I don’t enjoy, or the ways historians and museum exhibitions have failed to speak to me. I love mythology, historical fiction, storytelling—they make history feel alive to me, like stories already hidden in my veins, waiting for me to explore the worlds that have sprung from their creation. I have experienced this feeling, without a storyteller’s touch, occasionally in visiting museums dedicated to art and culture, but a history museum usually offers no appeal to me. The exceptions are the few museums of Black history I have been lucky enough to see, in Brazil, in Paris, in D.C., and especially the one in my hometown of Farmville, Virginia.

Founded in 2001, the Robert Russa Moton Museum sees itself as the birthplace of the student-led  U.S. civil rights movement.¹ From the building’s original opening in 1939 until 1993, it was part of the Prince Edward County school system and educated Farmville’s Black high school students. Named after Moton, an educator and author born in Prince Edward County, the building houses the history of an inspiring and fed up group of Black students who saw the education their white peers received compared to their own and who took up the fight for equality.² To these students, this did not necessarily mean desegregation.

On April 23, 1951 over 400 students, led by 16-year-old Barbara Johns, walked out of Robert Russa Moton High School demanding an equal yet segregated education.³ Their protest led to a lawsuit, Davis v. Prince Edward, later absorbed into the larger Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court case. Brown’s decision ended public school segregation—which was not the primary goal of the student protest at Moton—and began the decline of the Prince Edward school system as it fell prey to Virginia’s adoption of Massive Resistance calling for newly integrated schools to shut their doors completely rather than hold desegregated classes.⁴ Eight years after the initial student walk out, all public schools in Prince Edward closed their doors for five years.⁵ The county doubled down on segregation by opening the new Prince Edward Academy—a private school that exists today as Fuqua Academy.⁶ After four years without schooling, local “Free Schools” were opened in 1963 to remedy the lack of educational opportunities for Black school children, a year before the formal public schools reopened.

Free Schools classes were housed in local school buildings, including the former Moton High School. These schools held their first day of class for 1,550 students, only four of whom were white.⁷ The schools even caught the attention of Senator Robert Kennedy who visited Farmville on May 11, 1964. The packed schoolhouses of eager students forced local officials to recognize that change must finally come to Farmville.⁸ Only a year after volunteer educators began teaching crowds of students who had been denied a formal education, Prince Edward County reopened its doors, this time as a newly desegregated public school system. Now, the Robert Russa Moton Museum recounts and commemorates the long battle that was fought for an equitable education in Farmville. 

Once you arrive and turn into the small parking lot next to the museum, a mural greets you on the side of a storage house with a rough timeline of pivotal moments in the school’s history. In the top right corner, the phrase “The Eyes of the World Are on Us,” appears and reminds museum visitors that Farmville’s education inequality was not just local news, but that it captured the attention of the globe. Even before any steps were taken to help the students of our town, the world knew what was happening in Farmville.

Upon entering the museum, the gift shop projects a calmness and gentle warmth, seeming almost out of place knowing the conditions students were subjected to and the battle for education birthed inside. Browsing the gift shop reveals works from scholars and activists of the civil rights movement—there are of course names like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, but the best finds are the stories and publications from the kids, now adults, who called Farmville their home even in the midst of their own educational disempowerment. The people working in the office and shop are kind and gentle; they happily welcome excited students seeking knowledge to better understand the past.

My official tour of the museum began in the auditorium. To start, I am amazed at the similarities between the school my Black grandmother went to over half a century ago—the same school my white mother went to for seventh grade only twenty years ago—and the middle school I attended for four years. The flooring is different and the room is smaller, but the stage is identical down to the royal purple hue of the curtain. I sat in a folding chair, alone in the auditorium, as a video began.

The video featured a reenactment of that fateful April 23rd in which student leaders called an assembly and then the teachers were politely asked to leave the room. I witnessed Barbara Johns’s calm and steady demeanor as she listed the grievances of the student body and rallied her classmates to action. Johns reminded the student body that they too are human and deserved a quality education. They had tried their best as students even in a system constructed against their—our—interests. I am shocked and in awe of the power, strength, and resolve of these students. The film is new to me so I am enamored and enthralled, yet I am also playing a game of “Where’s Waldo” with the actors I recognize as students from my high school classes and school assemblies. As the video ends, I am left with a new appreciation for the history of my hometown. 

The museum is arranged as one long exhibit, serving as a timeline spread through hallways and cramped classrooms that once served—as best they could—the county’s Black students. Each piece of the exhibit documents the larger story of protest and advocacy, detailing the days before and years after the student protests and the radical changes since undertaken in Farmville. While one can feel hopeful at times, the museum also depicts a tragic story of children given so little and expected to be satisfied.

For me, the most lasting piece of the exhibit is a heater left in the middle of what was once a classroom—a stark reminder that the school’s teachers, administrators, and children only had the most meager and ineffective resources. One had to be close to the heater to feel its warmth; those too far away froze. That image symbolized the middle ground Black folks have been forced to walk in an attempt to have a shot at thriving in a world where everything is stacked against them.

As I stated, history has always felt daunting to me, but the Robert Russa Moton Museum whispered stories to me from its walls and shouted laments that have echoed through generations as I walked its corridors. Though I still find it difficult to call myself a historian, I have heard the cries of a distant past in the walls of the old school building. I have seen myself and my community lay ourselves bare for consumption, yet managed to keep a sense of self and worth. The Robert Russa Moton Museum is a museum of local history, but it is so much more than that—it is a glimpse into the past, a way of seeing into the lives of the people that raised me, and a monument dedicated to the power of change.

1. “The Moton Story,” Robert Russa Moton Museum, accessed June 15, 2020
2. As an educator, Moton is perhaps best known for succeeding Booker T. Washington as principal of the Tuskegee Institute. He ran the school for 20 years until his 1935 retirement. Complicating Moton’s legacy though is that while he oversaw Tuskegee, the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment, operated by the United States Public Health Service, began under his watch, starting in 1932. Even today it is not clear that he and other Tuskegee officials knew the full scope of the experiment and how it deliberately provided ineffective medical treatment against syphilis and never informed some participants of their syphilis diagnosis.
3. Lance Booth, “Overlooked No More: Barbara Johns, Who Defied Segregation in Schools.” New York Times, May 8, 2019.
4. “The State Responds: Massive Resistance.” The Library of Virginia, accessed April 18, 2020.
5. Katy June-Friesen, “Massive Resistance in a Small Town.” Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, 34, no. 5 (September/October 2013).
6. Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Past Ain’t Even the Past.” The Atlantic, December 12, 2011.
7. Emanuel Riley, “The Prince Edward County Free School Association.” Rediscovering Black History: National Archives and Records Administration, May 19, 2015; “Robert Kennedy Visit At Prince Edward County Schools, May 11, 1964.” Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia, accessed April 10, 2020 .
8. “Robert Kennedy Visited Prince Edward County Schools, May 11, 1964.” Education @ LVA: Library of Virginia, accessed April 1, 2020.

Cosima Smith

Cosima Smith is a freelance writer and visual artist from rural Virginia. At 23, they've lived in five countries on four continents and are an alumnus of the University of Virginia. You can read more of their work in the Black Youth Project, Wear Your Voice Magazine, and in various academic publications including a chapter in The Edge of Sex from Routledge.