US Capitol Finally Replaced Robert E Lee Statue With Teen Civil Rights Icon Barbara Rose Johns
After 111 years a statue of a Confederate general who committed treason against the United States has been replaced by a 16 year old girl who actually did something worth commemorating.
About time.
On Tuesday the US Capitol unveiled a new statue of Barbara Rose Johns in Emancipation Hall. The statue shows her as a teenager standing beside a lectern holding a tattered book over her head. Shes depicted in the moment that changed American education forever.
In 1951 Johns was just 16 years old when she led a student strike at R.R. Moton High School in Farmville Virginia. The Black students there were stuck in tar paper shacks while white students got an actual school building. Johns decided that wasnt acceptable and organized her classmates to walk out.
That strike caught the attention of NAACP lawyers. They filed a lawsuit that became one of the five cases the Supreme Court reviewed in Brown v. Board of Education. You know. The landmark 1954 decision that declared “separate but equal” unconstitutional. Kind of a big deal.
The ceremony Tuesday was exactly what youd hope for. Speaker Mike Johnson, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin and Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger all showed up. More than 200 members of Johns family were there. The Eastern Senior High School choir from Washington performed “How Great Thou Art” and “Aint Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round.”
Jeffries didnt hold back. “The Commonwealth of Virginia will now be properly represented by an actual patriot who embodied the principle of liberty and justice for all,” he said. “And not a traitor who took up arms against the United States to preserve the brutal institution of chattel slavery.”
Yeah. Thats the accurate description of Robert E. Lee that somehow took us this long to acknowledge officially.
The Lee statue was removed in December 2020 during the national reckoning over Confederate monuments following George Floyds death. It had represented Virginia in the Capitol since 1909. Now its at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture. Where it belongs.
The new Johns statue was sculpted by Steven Weitzman of Maryland. The pedestal includes the words “Are we going to just accept these conditions, or are we going to do something about it?” Plus a quote from Isaiah: “And a little child shall lead them.”
Johns sister Joan Johns Cobbs read from her sisters journal at the ceremony. “And then there were times I just prayed,” Johns had written. “God, please grant us a new school, please let us have a warm place to stay where we wont have to keep our coats on all day to stay warm. God, please help us. We are your children too.”
She was sixteen. Asking God for a warm school. In America.
Johns later married and became Barbara Rose Johns Powell. She raised five children and worked as a librarian in the Philadelphia Public Schools. She died at 56 in 1991. She never got to see this statue. But her daughter Terry Harrison was there Tuesday.
“She put God first in her life. She was brave, bold, determined, strong, wise, unselfish, warm and loving,” Harrison said about her mother.
Governor Youngkin visited the old school – now a National Historic Landmark and museum. He talked about standing in the tar shack classrooms with hot potbelly stoves and shabby desks. The place where a teenager decided enough was enough.
Theres also a sculpture of Johns at the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial outside the state Capitol in Richmond. But this one matters differently. This one goes in the US Capitol. In the same collection where Lee stood for over a century.
Each state gets two statues in the National Statuary Hall Collection. Virginias other representative is George Washington. So now the state is represented by the father of the country and a teenager who helped end segregation.
Thats a pretty significant upgrade from having a Confederate general standing alongside the first president.
We’ve been reckoning with what the Capitol symbolizes for a while now. This feels like actual progress.
Speaker Johnson said the statue will be placed in the Crypt. Not National Statuary Hall itself but still in the Capitol. Still making a statement every day about what Virginia values.
It only took 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education. But Barbara Rose Johns finally got her place in the peoples house. A teenager who changed America. Thats who should have been there all along.
