A teenage Virginia Civil Rights pioneer is now memorialized inside the United States Capitol. A statue of Barbara Rose Johns was unveiled Tuesday afternoon.
During the unveiling ceremony, her sister read from the journal Barbara Johns kept when she was a student.
"God, please grant us a new school," Cobbs read. "Please let us have a warm place to stay where we won't have to keep our coats on all day to stay warm."
Barbara Johns was a 16-year-old student in Farmville who organized students to protest the separate and unequal school facilities.
Governor Glenn Youngkin recounted conditions at Moton High School, where Johns was a student in 1951.
"Tar paper walls, shabby desks, right where 16-year-old Barbara Rose Johns courageously organized her schoolmates and stood up to the lie, the lie of separate but equal."
The school protest eventually led to court cases in Virginia and were incorporated into the US Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board decision that found segregated schools unconstitutional. But the process of desegregating Virginia's schools would take many more years, including the period of "Massive Resistance" when some counties closed their public schools altogether rather than integrate.
Barbara Johns died in 1991.
The statue is notable for who it is replacing in the crypt of the Capitol, Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
"The Commonwealth of Virginia will now be properly represented by an actual patriot, and not a traitor who took up arms against the United States to preserve the brutal institution of chattel slavery," House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Tuesday.
The Lee statue was removed from the Capitol back in 2020 and given to the Virginia Museum of History and Culture in Richmond.
