Statue of civil rights crusader poised to replace Robert E. Lee in US Capitol
Barbara Johns, who at 16 led student protests against segregated schools in Virginia, is likely to have her statue erected in the U.S. Capitol, replacing Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, a fellow Virginian, in National Statuary Hall.
Amid a national reckoning over the country’s history and self-conception, Confederate monuments and monikers, like Lee’s statue, have been criticized and removed for their fraught racial legacy.
“As a teenager (in 1951), Barbara Johns bravely led a protest that defied segregation and challenged the barriers that she and her African American peers faced, ultimately dismantling them,” Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam said in a statement after the Commission on Historical Statues in the United States Capitol voted Wednesday to recommend her statue.
As a teenager, Johns coordinated a student strike at her Farmville, Virginia, high school. Johns led calls denouncing the extremely overcrowded and under-resourced conditions in the town’s segregated Black schools compared with well-funded white facilities.
“It was time that Negroes were treated equally with whites, time that they had a decent school, time for the students themselves to do something about it,” Johns said in her diary, according to records kept by Longwood University in Farmville. “There wasn’t any fear. I just thought – this is your moment. Seize it!”
In April 1951, Johns led more than 400 students out of Robert Russa Moton High School in protest of segregated schools after a school bus accident killed five Black students, including a close friend of Johns.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People filed a lawsuit on behalf of Johns and other Farmville students. Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County was incorporated into the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case that ended school segregation.
Johns died in 1991 at the age of 56.