The Moton Walkout and the "Lost Generation" (1951)

This Day in Esoteric Political History

Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia

History

4.6 • 982 Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2022

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It’s April 24th. This day in 1951, Black students at Robert Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia have walked out of school, staging a strike over poor conditions at their school, particularly when compared to the white school across town.

Jody, NIki, and Kellie talk about what motivated the school strike, and how the legal case around the walkout would eventually join up with other similar cases around the country and reach the Supreme Court in the landmark Brown v Board ruling.

Sign up for our newsletter! Find out more at thisdaypod.com

And don’t forget about Oprahdemics, hosted by Kellie, out now from Radiotopia.

This Day In Esoteric Political History is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX.

Your support helps foster independent, artist-owned podcasts and award-winning stories.

If you want to support the show directly, you can do so on our website: ThisDayPod.com

Get in touch if you have any ideas for future topics, or just want to say hello. Our website is thisdaypod.com Follow us on social @thisdaypod

Our team: Jacob Feldman, Researcher/Producer; Brittani Brown, Producer; Khawla Nakua, Transcripts; music by Teen Daze and Blue Dot Sessions; Julie Shapiro and Audrey Mardavich, Executive Producers at Radiotopia

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.
0:07.0	My name is Jody Avergan.
0:10.0	This day, April 24, 1951, black students at Robert Rusa-Moulton High School in the town of
0:18.6	Farmville, Virginia walked out of school to protest the conditions of their education, which were vastly inferior to that of white students at a nearby school Farmville High School.
0:29.0	The strike was led by a student named Barbara Johns, who pointed out that her school had some 450 students
0:35.1	crammed into one single-story building. Tar paper shacks had been built outside
0:40.0	to handle the overflow. No laboratories, no gym, no cafeteria. So the students walked out. And that act in many ways was the start of the school's desegregation movement in America. The court case that resulted from this
0:53.6	protest would eventually be bundled with other cases and would
0:56.5	eventually reach the Supreme Court and lead to the landmark Brown versus
1:01.2	Board of Education ruling which deemed segregation in schools unconstitutional.
1:06.0	So let's talk about Moten, Barbara Johns, the first spark that eventually led to Brown v Board.
1:12.0	Here to discuss, as as always our Nicole Hammer of
1:14.5	Columbia and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley host of Oprah Demix I gotta keep
1:18.6	sneaking that in but hello there hello Jody hey there And contributors to our newsletter which is coming soon as well. So yes, we all do lots of things. So Barbara Johns, amazing. We'll get into her this strike, sorry, this walkout,
1:36.1	which actually I think maybe they did call it a strike,
1:38.1	but Kelly, can we talk a little bit about just sort of Virginia
1:42.2	and the mid-Atlantic, you know, a place that
1:45.6	when we think of civil rights protests maybe we think more deep south but...
1:49.8	Oh absolutely I think we're geared programmed and fairly so to see the civil rights movement through a very deep Southland. So we think of, you know, Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia. We don't necessarily think of Virginia and I think you
2:06.4	know when we covered Gloria Richardson a couple weeks back we talked about
2:10.4	Maryland, Cambridge Maryland and what it means to sort of see the civil rights struggle
2:14.8	play out there.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.