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Johns was both the highest and lowest, the most learned and most common, the most glorious reflection of their intellectual tastes and most obnoxious challenge to their dignity. He enjoyed reminding them that the same Moses who talked to God on Mount Sinai also rejected his status as the adopted grandson of Pharaoh to lead the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt. Like Moses, Johns received from his people a tumultuous vacillation between the extremes of veneration and rebellion. Unlike Moses, he worked no political miracles to sustain his leadership. Another resignation was tendered and refused in 1950.
    Johns often loaded the milk and cheese into his car and disappeared, driving up to the family farm in Virginia to spend a few days behind the plow. The animals or the equipment frequently dealt him some minor injury—he was nearing sixty now, and had not been a real farmer for thirty years.
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    In the spring of 1951, he drove to Virginia again. This time it was a crisis: the Ku Klux Klan had burned a cross in his brother’s yard to intimidate the Johns family over a school strike. The trouble had begun on the morning of April 23, 1951, at Farmville’s R. R. Moton High School (named for Booker T. Washington’s aide and successor), when the school’s principal was informed by telephone that the police were about to arrest two of his students down at the bus station. Failing to recognize the call as a ruse, he had dashed off for town. Shortly thereafter, a note from the principal was delivered to each classroom, summoning the whole school to a general assembly. All 450 students and twenty-five teachers filed into the auditorium, and the buzz of gossip gave way to shocked silence the instant the stage curtain opened to reveal not the principal but a sixteen-year-old junior named Barbara Johns. She announced that this was a special student meeting to discuss the wretched conditions at the school. Then she invited the teachers to leave. By now it had dawned on the teachers that this was a dangerous, unauthorized situation running in the direction of what was known as juvenile delinquency. Some of them moved to take over the stage, whereupon Barbara Johns took her shoe off and rapped it sharply on a school bench. “I want you all out of here!” she shouted at the teachers, beckoning a small cadre of her supporters to remove them from the room.
    This was Vernon Johns’s niece, the daughter of his brother Robert. She had lived with her uncle from time to time—taking piano lessons from Aunt Altona, coping with Uncle Vernon’s strict winter regimen in which all the children were required to play chess or read a book and to answer questions he might fire at them at any time on any subject. Barbara had rebelled by hiding a comic book between her knees; of all the Johns clan she was regarded as the one with a fiery temperament most like her uncle’s. Now she reminded her fellow 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 with coats on 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 mornings 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 related injustices, it was time for the students to protest. Even if improvement came too late to benefit them, she said, it would benefit their little brothers and sisters. With that, she called for a “strike,” and the entire student body marched out of the school behind her.
    Before the Negro adults had