Barbara Rose Johns Powell (March 6, 1935 – September 28, 1991)[1] was a leader in the American civil rights movement.

After securing NAACP legal support, the Moton students filed Davis v. Prince Edward County, the only student-initiated case consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring "separate but equal" public schools unconstitutional.

[3] Parents of the black students appealed to the all-white school board to provide a larger and properly equipped facility.

The students agreed to participate, and on that day they marched down to the county courthouse to make officials aware of the large difference in quality between the white and black schools.

Johns had hoped that the strike would end with the county officials sympathizing with the students and building them a new school, but was instead met with indifference and struggle.

"[10] On April 25, 1951, Oliver W. Hill and Spottswood Robinson, lawyers for the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), arrived in Prince Edward County to help the students of Robert Russa Moton High School, who had gone on strike.

While the strike was being carried out, Barbara Johns and other fellow student leaders sought legal counsel from the NAACP.

[11] For her part in the integration movement, Johns was harassed and the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in her yard.

In the Pulitzer Prize-winning Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63, the author Taylor Branch remarks upon Davis v. Prince Edward: The 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.

[15]The Virginia Civil Rights Memorial was opened in 2008, with Barbara Johns and several other students prominently featured on one side with the quote "It seemed like reaching for the Moon."

[16] Barbara Johns is now studied in the Virginia elementary school history curriculum, in the fourth grade unit on the Civil Rights and Massive Resistance.

[17] In 2010, Virginia artist Louis Briel completed a portrait of Johns, which hung in the state Capitol building before being permanently installed in the Robert Russa Moton Museum in Farmville.

[18] In 2017, Governor Terry McAuliffe officially named the Office of the Attorney General after Powell, for her impact on the civil rights movement.

[5] On August 17, 2017, in an interview with CBS This Morning, Governor Terry McAuliffe spoke about the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, with a portrait of Barbara Johns in the background.