Capitol Unveils Barbara Rose Johns Statue in Place of Robert E. Lee

The U.S. Capitol on Tuesday began displaying a statue of Barbara Rose Johns, the teenager who led a 1951 student strike over conditions at her segregated Virginia high school, in the spot once held by a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, CBS News and NBC News reported.

The unveiling took place in Emancipation Hall with Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, the state’s congressional delegation and Democratic Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger. More than 200 members of Johns’ family attended, Johnson said, and a Washington high school choir sang “How Great Thou Art,” “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round” and “Total Praise.”

“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,” Johnson said.

Johns was 16 in 1951 when she led students at R.R. Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia, in a strike to protest crowded, rundown conditions, especially compared with nearby white schools, CBS reported. NAACP lawyers backed the students, and their lawsuit became one of five cases the Supreme Court considered in Brown v. Board of Education. The court’s 1954 decision declared “separate but equal” public schools unconstitutional.

Johns later married the Rev. William Powell, raised five children and was a librarian in Philadelphia public schools. She died at 56 in 1991. “She put God first in her life. She was brave, bold, determined, strong, wise, unselfish, warm and loving,” said her daughter Terry Harrison.

The statue shows young Johns standing beside a lectern holding a tattered book overhead. The pedestal is engraved with a question she posed to classmates: “Are we going to just accept these conditions, or are we going to do something about it?” It also carries a line from the Book of Isaiah: “And a little child shall lead them.”

It replaces the Lee statue that represented Virginia in the Capitol for 111 years before it was removed in December 2020, during renewed national attention on Confederate monuments after the death of George Floyd. The Lee statue was relocated to the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

Jeffries used the ceremony to draw a contrast. “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,” he said.