Women’s Work: The Young Women Who Fought for School Integration

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling often taught as a turning point in American history. Chief Justice Earl Warren announced, “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” The case was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, and it’s become a civil rights touchstone, usually remembered as the moment the country declared segregation unconstitutional, and moved forward.

But the familiar story, the one taught in classrooms and echoed in political speeches, tells only part of the truth. In this version, a Kansas father named Oliver Brown sought better opportunities for his daughter, and the Supreme Court responded with justice. While there was some resistance in the South, schools supposedly integrated. Problem solved.

That comforting story misleads. It erases the students who also led the fight and the unrelenting resistance that followed. It allows Americans, especially white Americans, to imagine that school segregation ended in the 1950s, that the moral battle was settled in that chapter of the nation’s history.

But the fight for desegregation didn’t begin with parents alone and it didn’t end in the 1950s. Teenagers were key advocates in launching the movement to desegregate. And their voices came from across the country. Those opposing segregation met resistance that some believed would never end. And 71 years later, segregation is still a reality.

Linda Brown was just eight years old when the NAACP filed her father’s name as the lead plaintiff against the Topeka, Kansas school board on February 28, 1951. But just weeks later, 16-year-old Barbara Johns, who lived in Prince Edward County, Virginia, didn’t wait for her parents to act. Johns was one of 400 students crammed into a school built for 180, with inadequate facilities. Some classrooms still had potbelly stoves that heated them poorly. Others were little more than shacks lined with tar paper.

On April 23, 1951, Johns took action. She and other students made a plan: They led the principal to believe there were truant students hanging out downtown. When he left the school to investigate, Johns and the others gathered all the students in the auditorium. That meeting sparked a two-week strike over the school’s conditions. Johns and other student leaders contacted the NAACP in Richmond. At a mass meeting on May 3, NAACP attorneys urged the students to fight for desegregation — not just better facilities.

Over 100 people signed a petition to ask the school board to desegregate the schools. The students ended the strike on May 7 and returned to school. When the school board denied the petition just two weeks later, the NAACP filed a case to push for desegregation. The first to sign the petition was a high school freshman named Dorothy E. Davis — her name became the one on the case. Dorothy E. Davis, et al. v. County School Board of Prince Edward County was one of the five cases combined together under the banner of Brown v. Board of Education at the Supreme Court in October 1952. It had been just a year-and-a-half since Barbara Johns led the strike.

Despite the landmark Brown ruling in 1954, progress was slow. By then, Barbara Johns had been sent out of state by her family for safety. In the years following Brown, the Supreme Court ordered schools to desegregate “with all deliberate speed,” but pushback intensified. In Virginia’s Prince Edward County, Moton High School never got improvements, nor did the Black students get to attend the all-white school. Instead, by 1959, county leaders shut down all public schools in the county. They opened all-white private schools, leaving Black students without public education until 1964.

In South Carolina, desegregation didn’t begin until 1963, delaying with tactics like district consolidation and a sales tax to equalize funding between white and Black schools. These decisions were made specifically to avoid further pressure to desegregate by instead routing funds into Black schools, which had less money allocated to them. In 1963, the legislature approved tuition grants for white families who wanted to avoid integration by enrolling their children in private schools. That August, a judge ruled that 11 Black students — including 15-year-old Millicent Brown — could attend Charleston’s white schools. The case, Millicent Brown et al. v. Charleston County School Board, marked the start of desegregation in the city, but stopped short of mandating full integration across South Carolina. The judge ruled only that Millicent and ten other students could attend all-white schools.

But being one of the first Black students to be integrated into a previously all-white school was never simple or easy for students like Millicent Brown. By senior year, Brown’s experiences had taken a toll on her health. In the decades that followed, as Brown went on to earn a PhD and become a professor of U.S. history, she continued to reckon with what it meant to break these barriers. In the early 2000s, she founded Somebody Had to Do It, a project that gathers oral histories from other “first children” who integrated formerly all-white schools. Their stories reveal what’s often missing: that long after 1954, desegregation came at a cost borne by children.

Throughout the 1960s, segregation persisted — not only in the South, but also in places like Boston. In the 1970s and 1980s, many cities began creating voluntary busing programs to help integrate schools.

Integration has improved since the mid-20th century, but segregation remains. Today, segregation in education is not just about race, but also about money. According to researchers at USC and Stanford, over the last three decades, racial segregation has risen 64 percent in the largest school districts in the country. Economic segregation has risen 50 percent. These realities don’t stem from demographics or neighborhoods alone. They are policy choices, the researchers say; decisions made that have had very real consequences.

For Barbara Johns, Millicent Brown, and countless other students, desegregation wasn’t simply about better textbooks or newer buildings. They demanded dignity, equality, and full citizenship. Separate schools could not offer these, regardless of quality. Their fight was not just about potbelly stoves or long walks to campus. They wanted access to the same opportunities their white peers had.

Today, new policies echo old resistance. Voucher and charter programs divert funds from public schools, offering “choice” that often increases segregation. The consequence is that many children are left behind — not because of ability or desire, but because of zip code, wealth, or race.

It is the consequence, too, of forgetting, and of telling history as a triumph instead of learning from it carefully.

Seventy-one years later, Brown v. Board is still invoked as a promise fulfilled, obscuring the struggle that followed. For far too many American students, the promise of Brown remains out of reach. We will continue to fall short until we reckon with what the fight for desegregation truly meant, what it still demands of us, and what it tells us about our priorities as a nation.