Up close with civil rights history

For 57 years, John Stokes kept his role in ending segregation to himself.

On Thursday, he shared his story of leading "The Manhattan Project" with eighth-graders at Hill Middle School in Naperville.

"Sometimes it just hurts to remember, so I kept it inside," said Stokes, who was in town promoting his book "Students on Strike: Jim Crow, Civil Rights, Brown and Me."

"But it was time for this story to be told."

Hill librarian Karen Ebner said eighth-grade social studies students have been reading the book in class while studying the 1950s.

"They all read it and now they're meeting a man who helped change the course of history in their gymnasium," Ebner said. "How many students get to do that?"

Growing up on his family's Kingsville, Va., farm, Stokes knew going to school, even if it was only a rundown shack with leaky tarpaper walls, was his ticket to a better life than his parents and grandparents had.

More than 400 black students crammed into the 180-seat school all with the same vision. But on April 23, 1951, Stokes and several others decided that the school with a potbelly stove for heat and no running water, indoor plumbing or cafeteria, was no longer good enough.

On that day, he and a group of fellow students staged a strike at R.R. Moton High School that helped bring an end to segregation in Virginia's school system and eventually throughout the country.

"We have a cliché that we used: 'We built bricks out of straw,'" he said. "We made something out of nothing."

They planned the strike in secret meetings, plotted to send the principal on a wild goose chase after "truant" students, and boycotted classes until conditions improved.

The NAACP took up their case only when the students agreed to seek an integrated school rather than improved conditions at their building. A state court rejected a lawsuit on the matter, which was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and later became one of five cases incorporated into Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 case that overturned school segregation.

"This made the county officials so angry that in 1959 they closed all of the public schools until 1964 when they were integrated," Stokes said. "Ladies and gentleman, can you imagine not being able to go to school for five years? They were programming us to fail,m but instead we prevailed."

Students, many of whom hung on Stokes' every word, said they were inspired by the book and even more so after meeting Stokes.

"His story just shows that we've got a long way to go as a nation," said 14-year-old Erin Calhoun. "But it also shows how far we've come in recent history."

Connor Culloton, also 14, said Stokes was a "great speaker" who held his interest while bringing the story to life.

Asked about the students' attentiveness and openness in asking questions, Stokes wasn't surprised.

"That's what I do," he said. "I empower everyone I have the pleasure to speak to."