A statue of Barbara Rose Johns was unveiled and placed in the U.S. Capitol Crypt and displayed in Emancipation Hall, following Virginia’s decision to remove a Robert E. Lee statue in 2020 and replace it with Johns’s likeness.Sculpted by Steven Weitzman and approved by the Architect of the Capitol and the Joint Committee on the Library, the bronze shows Johns at 16 holding a tattered book above a lectern while more than 200 family members and leaders including Mike Johnson, Hakeem Jeffries, Glenn Youngkin and Abigail Spanberger attended and the Eastern Senior High School choir performed.The statue commemorates Johns’s 1951 student strike at R.R. Moton High School that led
NAACP lawyers
Spottswood Robinson and
Oliver Hill to bring a case consolidated in
Brown v. Board of Education; federal actions in 2025 by
Donald Trump to restore some removed monuments and the reinstallation of an
Albert Pike monument in October did not stop Virginia from completing its five-year replacement process.