The Robert Russa Moton Museum is a historic site and museum at 900 Griffin Boulevard in Farmville, Prince Edward County, Virginia. It is located in the former Robert Russa Moton High School, considered "the student birthplace of America's Civil Rights Movement" for its role in providing a majority of the plaintiffs in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case desegrating public schools. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1998, and is now a museum dedicated to that history. The museum were named for African-American educator Robert Russa Moton.SchoolThe former Moton School is a single-story brick Colonial Revival building, built in 1939 in response to activism and legal challenges from the local African-American community and legal challenges from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It houses six classrooms and an office arranged around a central auditorium. It had no cafeteria or restrooms for teachers. Built to handle 180 students, already by the 1940s it struggled to hold 450; the County, whose all-white board refused to appropriate funds for properly expanding the school facilities, built long temporary buildings to house the overflow. Covered with roofing material, they were called the "tar-paper shacks."
