The US Capitol on Tuesday began displaying a statue of a teenaged Barbara Rose Johns as she protested poor conditions at her segregated Virginia high school, a pointed replacement for a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that was removed several years ago, the AP reports. An unveiling ceremony of the statue representing Virginia in the Capitol took place in Emancipation Hall, featuring Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Virginia's congressional delegation, and Democratic Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger.
Johnson said more than 200 members of Johns' family were on hand, listening on as the ceremony included renditions of "How Great Thou Art," "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me 'Round" and "Total Praise" performed by the Eastern Senior High School choir from Washington. "We are here to honor one of America's true trailblazers, a woman who embodied the essence of the American spirit in her fight for liberty and justice and equal treatment under the law, the indomitable Barbara Rose Johns," Johnson said.
Johns was 16 years old in 1951 when she led a student strike for equal education at R.R. Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia. The students' cause gained the support of NAACP lawyers, who filed a lawsuit that would become one of the five cases that the US Supreme Court reviewed in Brown v. Board of Education. The high court's landmark 1954 decision declared "separate but equal" public schools unconstitutional. The statue shows the young Johns standing to the side of a lectern, holding a tattered book over her head. Its pedestal is engraved with the words, "Are we going to just accept these conditions, or are we going to do something about it?" It also features a quote from the Book of Isaiah, "And a little child shall lead them."
The statue replaces one of Lee that was removed in December 2020 from the Capitol, where it had represented Virginia for 111 years. The removal occurred during a time of renewed national attention over Confederate monuments after the death of George Floyd and was relocated to the Virginia Museum of History & Culture. "The Commonwealth of Virginia will now be properly represented by an actual patriot who embodied the principle of liberty and justice for all, and not a traitor who took up arms against the United States to preserve the brutal institution of chattel slavery," Jeffries said at the ceremony.
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