The Robert Russa Moton Museum will close for the holiday season beginning Friday, December 24, 2010, with administrative offices reopening Monday, January 3, 2011.
The museum will remain closed to visitors through April 23, 2011 as renovation of the auditorium, rear corridors and adjacent classrooms begins.
Hours of operation for administrative matters only are by appointment, Monday thru Friday 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. To schedule an appointment please dial 434-315-8775, or send an e-mail to [email protected].
The Moton Museum will reopen to visitors on Saturday, April 23, 2011.
The Robert Russa Moton Museum is committed to the preservation and positive interpretation of the history of civil rights in education, specifically as it relates to Prince Edward County and the role its citizens played in America’s struggle to move from a segregated to an integrated society.
Dear Friends,
My wife and I (a white couple) met each other in the parking lot of First Baptist Church, Farmville, in June 1965. We were among about 40 college students who spent the summer of 1965 teaching a remedial reading course to about 500 African American children and youth at 7 or 8 different sites around Prince Edward County. We taught together that summer and fell in love during the next school year; we were married in April of 1967 in my wife’s hometown of Lebanon, Tennessee. All of us volunteers – some white, some black – lived in homes in the African American neighborhood that summer. We took our evening meals in the basement of First Baptist Church. At the end of the summer, Pastor L. Francis Griffin of First Baptist asked Judy and me when we were going to get married. He knew something was brewing between us! We blushed.
We returned during our courtship several times to visit an African American couple out in the Pamplin area – Mr. and Mrs. Walter Jones. They were an older American couple who took Judy and me under their wings that summer.
In 1990, in celebration of our meeting 25 years earlier in Farmville, Judy and I returned to Farmville with our younger daughter for a visit. We found one of our students from 1965 and also visited with a volunteer from that summer, a native of Farmvile, who had left Farmville to live with a family in Iowa when the public schools were closed.
We want to come to the reopening of the Moton Museum on Saturday, April 23, but want to make sure first that it WILL be opened that day since we live about 500 miles from Farmville; its a long drive! I will have to be back in Perrysburg, Ohio, for Sunday services Easter Sunday morning, April 24. I am a pastor and cannot be away from my congregation on Easter Sunday. We will need to start our drive back to Perrysburg, Ohio, by noon on Saturday the 23rd.
Our sincere thanks to all who make the museum a reality!
Gene and Judy Pearson
PS By the way, each September we are invited to talk to the Civil Rights Law class at the University of Toledo about our experiences in Farmville in 1965. We mostly talk about the courage of Barbara Johns who led that student strike of her classmates on April 23, 1951. We so wish we could have met her before she died!!!!!!