Dec. 17 (UPI) — A statue of Barbara Rose Johns, a Black teenage girl who protested segregation, has been unveiled at the U.S. Capitol, four years after Virginia selected the civil rights icon to represent the state instead of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
The unveiling ceremony was held Tuesday afternoon in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center’s Emancipation Hall.
“Today, 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,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said in his opening remarks during the ceremony.
Johnson said more than 200 members of the Johns family were present for the ceremony, as well as Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, and nearly 50 Virginia state officials.
The statue depicts Johns as a 16-year-old speaking to her classmates at Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville, Va., urging them to join her in a strike for better school facilities and supplies, according to the website of the Architect of the Capitol.
Johns is celebrated for leading a walkout of her Farmville high school in April of 1951, which helped lead to the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka decision that declared segregation unconstitutional.
Virginia donated the statue, designed by artists Steven Weitzman, to the National Statuary Hall Collection this year to replace the statue of Lee that had once represented the state in the Capitol.
The Lee statue had been donated by the state to the collection in 1909 and was ordered to be removed by the state amid nationwide unrest against racial injustice following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Along with the Lee statue, several Confederate statutes throughout the country were removed or torn down.
“Today, we witnessed a Capitol where every American’s history and life can be reflected. Where we can all see ourselves in our nation’s history. Where every American child can access an equal and adequate education,” Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., said in a statement that was published to X along with pictures of her and others posing with the statue of Johns.
“Even in these difficult times, when progress feels so stalled, let today be a reminder that we can continue to push, to move forward. And we must.”
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