Statue Of Teen Civil Rights Activist Barbara Rose Johns Unveiled At U.S. Capitol

More than 200 members of Johns’s extended family attended the ceremony to celebrate her legacy of courage and commitment to justice.

On Dec. 16, a new statue honoring civil rights pioneer Barbara Rose Johns was unveiled in the U.S. Capitol.

The statue of Johns replaces a long-standing monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The bronze figure of Johns was revealed in Emancipation Hall at a ceremony attended by national and state leaders, family members, and civil rights advocates. The Capitol ceremony, posted to YouTube, featured Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, and Virginia Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger.

“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,” Johnson said during the event.

Gov. Youngkin celebrated the monument in a post on X, calling Johns’s contribution to Virginia an integral piece of the state’s history.

“Today we gathered in the Emancipation Hall of the U.S. Capitol to dedicate the Barbara Rose Johns statue, to honor her legacy as a trailblazer, and ensure her story of courage and conscience is a story for generations to come. You can’t tell the story of Virginia, or the story of how our nation overcame segregation, without telling the story of Barbara Rose Johns,” he wrote.

Johns was 16 years old in 1951 when she led a student strike at R.R. Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia, to protest substandard and segregated school conditions. The students’ actions helped draw the attention of NAACP lawyers. The lawyers would file one of the five cases that the high court consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled that “separate but equal” public schools were unconstitutional.

The statue depicts Johns holding a tattered book above her head and stands as one of Virginia’s two contributions to the National Statuary Hall Collection. It was created by sculptor Steven Weitzman and will be displayed in the Capitol Crypt.

More than 200 members of Johns’s extended family attended the ceremony to celebrate her legacy of courage and commitment to justice.