Taylor Branch, in his book Parting The Waters, relates the story of Barbara Johns, then a Junior at R.R. Morton High School in Farmville, Va., in 1951. A school assembly was called and when students and teachers arrived in the auditorium, they were met not by school administrators, but by Johns. She informed those gathered that the meeting was to discuss the wretched conditions of the school. Here is Branch’s description of the event:

…she reminded the students of the sorry history since 1947, when the county had built three temporary tar-paper shacks to house the overflow at the school—how the students had to sit in the shacks in the cold through the winter; how her history teacher, who doubled as the bus driver, was obliged to gather wood and start fires in the shacks in the morning after driving a bus that was a hand-me-down from the white school and didn’t have much heat either, when it was running; how the county had been promising the Negro principal a new school for a long time, but had discarded those promises like old New Year’s resolutions; and how, because the adult Negroes had been rebuffed in trying to correct these and a host of other injustices, it was time for the students to protest.

Barbara called for a “strike” and her fellow students marched out of the school with her. At first, the school administration and the local NAACP were unsympathetic with the students, but after pressure from the students’ supporters, the NAACP filed suit a month later. This legal action was joined to three other cases in what became Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

I found this story a powerful reminder of how, in the absence of fairness and justice, individuals sometimes took bold and risky actions. This is true of our racially divided past as much as of the Sons of Liberty acting against 18^th Century Britain. Both events are part of the history of America and need to be remembered and honored if we are to avoid self-delusion.

However, facing that history is difficult for all of us. We all have the urge to erase our unpleasant past—to create a narrative that glosses over our failure to live up to our better selves. This is true for us as individuals as well as for us as a nation.  The history we prefer is one that ignores references to racial and gender struggles; that privileges one segment of our communal mosaic to the neglect, even dismissal, of those segments which do not fit the revised narrative wishing to be told; that exchanges reality for mythmaking. 

Yet, experience has taught us that we do not make ourselves more important, by making others less important; we do not enhance our own respect when we treat others with disrespect; nor do we make our national portrait more vibrant by painting it in monotone.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus states that “you shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” This statement has implications both spiritual and cultural. When we embrace the truth, we discover freedom to see our history clearly, to honor the many hands and shoulders upon which we stand, and to live into our true identity as a people. If we welcome the full story, with both its triumphs and its trials, we are strengthened by a collective ethos that binds us together. When we commit ourselves to honesty, to listening deeply, and to lifting every voice, we create the possibility of a future marked not by repetition of the harms of the past, but by renewal and hope. The truth, faced with humility and courage, sets us free to live more fully into the abundant life God intends for us.

Barbara Johns spoke the truth and that truth brought freedom. May her story be our story and may we all work toward that freeing reconciliation that only truth can ensure.

David Yeager,

Sr. Warden