Teen civil rights leader’s statue replaces Gen. Lee at Capitol

Lawmakers gathered on Tuesday to unveil a statue of Virginia civil rights leader Barbara Rose Johns at the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. In 1951, 16-year-old Johns organized a protest that later contributed to the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. The new statue depicts a young Johns holding a worn book over her head while standing beside a pedestal reading, “Are we going to just accept these conditions, or are we going to do something about it?” The design also includes a phrase from Isaiah 11:6: “And a little child shall lead them.”

At the National Statuary Hall, each state is represented with two donated statues depicting two of its historic figures. Johns’ likeness will replace a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, removed in late 2020 after 111 years of representing the state in the Capitol’s statue hall. Johns will join Virginia’s 1934 statue of George Washington.

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., posted an old video of Lee’s statue removal on Tuesday to mark the installation of Johns’ new one.

How did Johns impact Brown v. Board of Education? Johns led a successful strike in 1951 at her high school to protest school segregation, according to the Virginia state government. The 16-year-old convinced Farmville High School’s entire student body, about 450 teenagers, to walk out of school and protest at the local city hall.

The protest received major media attention and prompted the NAACP to file a lawsuit on the students’ behalf to fight the “separate but equal” legal doctrine that enabled segregation. Johns’ case, Dorothy Davis et al v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Virginia, was eventually grouped into the landmark case that the high court ruled on in 1954. Johns died in 1991 at the age of 56 after battling bone cancer. Virginia renamed its attorney general’s building in her honor in 2017. 

Dig deeper: Read Carolina Lumetta’s report on a local removal of Lee’s statue in 2021.