In an interview ahead of the event, Joan Johns Cobbs, 87, remembers the fear she felt in 1951 when her older sister Barbara led that walkout. “It was dangerous for Black people to stand up,” Cobbs said in an interview Sunday, as she and her husband prepared to drive to D.C. from their home in New Jersey to attend the ceremony.
But she said Barbara never showed any fear. They were a farm family — poor, mostly working tobacco — and because their mother regularly traveled to D.C. for jobs, Barbara was left supervising her younger sister and three younger brothers.
“We always perceived her as being bossy,” Cobbs said. “She was thrust into a role at an early age that caused her to sort of be aloof from us, because she had to reprimand us.”
The situation made Barbara Johns reserved, stubborn and filled with determination, she said. “She always acted as if she wasn’t afraid of anything.”
When she saw White school kids speed by in their comfortable school buses, carrying new books and studying in heated and clean classrooms, Barbara Johns realized that the drafty, tar-paper-covered facilities where Black students huddled were unacceptable. She arranged for friends to get the principal summoned downtown one day, then rallied more than 400 fellow students to walk out in protest.
Later that year, a friendly White farmer warned the girls’ father that Barbara was in danger, Cobbs said, so she was sent to stay with a relative in Alabama — her uncle, civil rights activist Vernon Johns — for her senior year of high school.
Johns’s complaints contributed to what became one of the Supreme Court’s most revered decisions, but the legacy of Brown is mixed.
“It’s very clear that many of our leaders today are more comfortable celebrating Brown as a symbol than actually worrying about whether we’ve achieved the promise of the case,” said Ary Amerikaner, executive director of Brown’s Promise, a nonprofit that is working to challenge school segregation.
Last year, the Civil Rights Project calculated that 20 percent of all U.S. schools were “intensely segregated” as of 2021, meaning White students make up 10 percent or less of the student body. These schools were far more likely to educate students with the fewest advantages and most needs — in 2021, 78 percent of them were poor.
So although today’s school segregation is not remotely comparable to what it was in 1951, experts say the problem has not been solved.