Seven black men, seven death penalties

Mass 1951 Virginia executions insulted an emerging civil rights movement

On April 23, 1951, black students led by Barbara Johns at Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia, walked out to protest the dilapidated conditions of their school and inadvertently triggered a Civil Rights movement.

Moton High School was dramatically substandard to the more modern educational facilities enjoyed by the students’ white counterparts in economically depressed Southside Virginia. It had no indoor plumbing, no cafeteria, no gymnasium and no athletic field. A few years earlier, Prince Edward County had added several tar paper-covered plywood sheds in a laughably pathetic attempt to accommodate the over 400 students.

The walkout was a seminal moment in civil rights history. Just weeks earlier, however, another seminal Civil Rights moment occurred when seven black men, from just down the road in the city of Martinsville, who had been sentenced to death by all-white juries for the rape of a white woman, were executed in assembly-line fashion at the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond.

While the Moton walkout remains a positive achievement in Virginia history that led to the desegregation of public schools, the “Martinsville seven” case was a clear and…