Congress Finally Reveals Replacement For Robert E. Lee Statue — And Everyone Is Confused

After five years of speculation, Congress finally revealed which Virginian would replace Confederate General Robert E. Lee in the U.S. Capitol — a 16-year-old civil rights activist named Barbara Rose Johns — and a lot of people promptly asked who she is.

Johns’ 11-foot bronze statue was unveiled Tuesday in Emancipation Hall and will soon move to the Capitol Crypt, where it will stand alongside George Washington as one of Virginia’s two contributions to the National Statuary Hall Collection, taking the niche Lee’s statue occupied for 111 years before its 2020 removal. (RELATED: In Defense Of Robert E. Lee)

“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,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said at the ceremony.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger joined more than 200 members of Johns’ family for the unveiling, which featured gospel standards from a D.C. high school choir.

Johns led a 1951 student walkout from the all-black Moton High School in Farmville to protest crumbling facilities and overcrowded tar-paper classrooms; the NAACP turned her strike into one of the five cases that became Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that ended de jure school segregation.

Sculptor Steven Weitzman depicts Johns mid-speech, book thrust overhead, with her pedestal engraved with her challenge to classmates — “Are we going to just accept these conditions, or are we going to do something about it?” — and the biblical line “And a little child shall lead them.”

Outside Virginia, though, Johns is hardly a household name. A Democratic blogger cheerleading the swap back in 2020 opened his explainer with, “Who is Barbara Johns, you ask?” A Daily Kos diarist went blunter — “Who the Fuck is Barbara Johns??” — for the “original title” of the essay.

Lee’s bronze, donated in 1909, was hauled out of the Crypt in December 2020 and shipped to the Virginia Museum of History & Culture as part of a broader purge of Confederate symbols. Johns now joins a growing list of civil rights figures — including Mary McLeod Bethune and Daisy Bates — who have replaced Confederate icons in the Capitol’s marble lineup.