A statue of civil rights trailblazer Barbara Rose Johns is replacing one of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in the U.S. Capitol
On Tuesday (December 16), an 11-foot bronze statue of Johns, who led a landmark student walkout against segregation in schools as a teenager, was unveiled in Emancipation Hall in the Capitol Visitor Center, per NPR.
Johns was just 16 when she organized a strike in 1951 at Virginia’s segregated Robert Russa Moton High School, protesting overcrowded classrooms and inferior facilities for Black students. The walkout helped spark a legal challenge that became part of Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared school segregation unconstitutional.
“Before the sit-ins in Greensboro, before the Montgomery bus boycott, there was the student strike here in 1951, led by Barbara Johns,” Cameron Patterson, former head of the Moton Museum, said in a statement.
The Capitol Visitor Center allows each state to honor two historical figures. For more than a century, Virginia was represented by George Washington and Lee, whose statue was removed in 2020 amid a national reckoning over Confederate symbols.
Johns' statue, which is replacing that of Lee's, was created by Maryland artist Steven Weitzman and depicts the trailblazing teenager standing at a podium. Its base bears her rallying words: “Are we going to just accept these conditions, or are we going to do something about it?”
Joan Johns Cobb, the sister of Barbara Rose Johns, who died in 1991 at age 56, said the statue reflects overdue recognition.
“I think Virginia is trying to correct some of its inequities,” she said. “Choosing her is one way to rectify what happened in the past.”
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