A statue of civil rights pioneer Barbara Rose Johns was unveiled Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025, in the U.S. Capitol, replacing the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that had represented Virginia for more than a century.
The 11-foot bronze statue, created by artist Steven Weitzman, depicts Johns as a teenager standing at a podium with a tattered book raised above her head. Its base bears her rallying words:
“Are we going to just accept these conditions, or are we going to do something about it?” A quote from the Book of Isaiah, “And a little child shall lead them,” is also engraved.
Johns, just 16 at the time, led a historic student strike in 1951 at Virginia’s segregated Robert Russa Moton High School to protest overcrowded classrooms and inferior facilities for Black students.
The protest attracted the support of NAACP lawyers and became part of the legal challenge that culminated in the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which declared school segregation unconstitutional.
The unveiling ceremony in Emancipation Hall featured Virginia’s congressional delegation, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin, and Democratic Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger. More than 200 of Johns’ relatives were in attendance, while the Eastern Senior High School choir performed hymns and civil rights songs, including How Great Thou Art and Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round.
Johnson called Johns “one of America’s true trailblazers, a woman who embodied the essence of the American spirit in her fight for liberty, justice, and equal treatment under the law.” Jeffries added, “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.”
Johns later became Barbara Rose Johns Powell, raising five children while working as a librarian in Philadelphia before passing away in 1991 at age 56.
Her daughter, Terry Harrison, described her mother as “brave, bold, determined, strong, wise, unselfish, warm, and loving.”
The Johns statue is part of the National Statuary Hall Collection, where each state contributes two statues. Virginia’s other statue honors George Washington. The former Lee statue was removed in December 2020 amid a nationwide reexamination of Confederate monuments following the death of George Floyd and is now displayed at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.
Johns is also commemorated at the Virginia Civil Rights Memorial in Richmond. The former Moton High School, where she led the strike, has been designated a National Historic Landmark and operates as a museum.
“This moment is profoundly symbolic,” said Governor Youngkin, “standing in a tar shack classroom with a potbelly stove, looking at shabby desks, right where 16-year-old Barbara Rose Johns courageously organized her schoolmates and stood up to the lie — the lie that was ‘separate but equal.’”
