Barbara Rose Johns, a civil rights activist known for leading a student strike at age 16, has recently had her posthumous statue approved for potential installation in the U.S. Capitol.
Johns was instrumental in the eventual decision to end segregation regarding educational opportunities. At age 16, she led a student strike at Robert Russa Moton High School (now the Robert Russa Moton Museum) in Prince Edward County in 1951.
Recommended Videos
This strike caught the attention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which then filed a lawsuit titled Davis v. Prince Edward County. This lawsuit became one of the five cases that led to the momentous decision to desegregate public schools in Brown v. Board of Education.
Born to Robert and Adele Violet Johns on March 6, 1935, Johns was the oldest of five children. She and her mother and siblings moved to her parents’ hometown of Prince Edward County after her father joined the U.S. Army. Johns worked on her family’s tobacco farm and the country store owned by her uncle, Vernon Napoleon Johns, who was a minister and civil rights activist and a predecessor to Martin Luther King Jr.
She attended the all-Black high school Robert Russa Moton High School, which could only hold 200 students. Due to overcrowding, some students had classes held on school buses and in the auditorium.
Johns decided to meet with several students to plan a potential strike after numerous parents appealed to the school board for a new facility, only for the board to respond by installing several tar-paper shacks to accommodate the overflow of students. Johns, along with other students, lured the school principal away from the school grounds to call student leaders to the auditorium, where she described her plans for a strike to protest the conditions at Moton High.
This led to a strike that lasted two weeks and prompted two Virginia NAACP leaders, Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill, to file a lawsuit in federal court in Richmond, Virginia. The case, Davis v. Prince Edward County, applied pressure on school officials to address the overcrowding by integrating the white high school or building a new facility. This case formed the basis for the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to desegregate schools across the nation.
Earlier this week, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources (DHR) announced that the Commission for Historical Statues in the U.S. Capitol (the Commission) voted unanimously in its public meeting to approve the statue of civil rights leader Barbara Rose Johns for installation in the U.S. Capitol. After the Architect of the Capitol reviews the statue at the federal level and the Joint Committee on the Library approves it, the statue is expected to be unveiled as one of Virginia’s two contributions to the Statuary Hall Collection by the end of this year.
This follows the Commission’s determination on whether to replace the Robert E. Lee statue. If so, it was recommended that a replacement statue “of a prominent Virginia citizen of historic renown or renowned for distinguished civil or military service” be proposed to the General Assembly.
DHR Director Julie Langan forwarded photos of the statue of Barbara Rose Johns to the Architect of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., for review after the public meeting Wednesday. After the Joint Committee on the Library gives final approval, the statue will be transported from the sculptor’s studio in Maryland to the U.S. Capitol for installation.
Langan will work with members of Johns’ family to plan an unveiling ceremony and reception in the U.S. Capitol.
Both events are expected to take place in November or December.