A new statue honoring teenage civil rights leader Barbara Rose Johns has taken the place once held by a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee at the U.S. Capitol, marking a significant shift in how Virginia is represented in the National Statuary Hall Collection.
The statue of Johns was unveiled Tuesday and will represent Virginia alongside a statue of George Washington. Johns’ statue replaces one of Lee that stood in the Capitol for more than a century before being removed in 2020 amid renewed national scrutiny of Confederate monuments. The Lee statue was later relocated to the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.
Johns is remembered for her role as a 16-year-old student in Farmville, Virginia, who led a strike in 1951 to protest poor conditions at the segregated R.R. Moton High School. Her leadership helped spark a legal challenge supported by NAACP attorneys that became one of five cases consolidated into the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional.
The sculpture depicts Johns as a teenager standing beside a lectern and holding a worn book aloft, symbolizing her call to action for equal education. The statue includes engraved text referencing the moral courage of youth and reflects her central role in pushing for change at a young age.
After her activism, Johns later moved north, married the Rev. William Powell, raised five children and worked as a librarian in the Philadelphia Public Schools. She died in 1991 at the age of 56, years before her contributions gained widespread public recognition.
The unveiling ceremony took place in Emancipation Hall at the Capitol Visitor Center and included bipartisan congressional leaders, Virginia officials and members of Johns’ family. More than 200 relatives were in attendance. The statue is scheduled to be installed in the Capitol Crypt, where several other state statues are displayed.
Virginia formally moved to replace the Lee statue following recommendations from a state commission convened after the nationwide protests over racial injustice in 2020. Final approval for the Johns statue was granted earlier this year by the Architect of the Capitol and the Joint Committee on the Library.
Source: NBC News