Ground broken for civil rights monument at state Capitol

RICHMOND

Standing on a grassy patch of earth between the Governor’s Mansion and the state Capitol on Tuesday, Joy Cabarrus Speakes and John Watson couldn’t help but smile.

Moments earlier, they had watched the first shovelfuls of dirt being removed from the Capitol Square site where a civil-rights monument is to be installed later this year.

Among those the memorial will depict are black students who led a walkout at Prince Edward County’s Robert Russa Moton High School in April 1951 to protest the physical condition of the segregated school.

Speakes and Watson participated in that student strike; a lawsuit later filed on behalf of the students was one of five that were combined into the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on that case in 1954 paved the way for the end of public school segregation.

“You cannot have equality without diversity. You have to have diversity to be equal,” said the 68-year-old Speakes, who was a freshman at the time of the walkout.

The Virginia Civil Rights Memorial is scheduled to be installed in July.

On Monday, Watson said he regrets that Barbara Rose Johns isn’t alive to see the accomplishment.

Johns was the student who organized the walkout to protest conditions that Watson, a junior that year, remembers as “atrocious.”

“They treated us worse than they treated their animals,” he said.

Some of Johns’ relatives – her younger sister, Joan Johns Cobbs, and one of her daughters, Terry Harrison – attended Tuesday’s groundbreaking.

Harrison said she didn’t learn of her mother’s place in history until a documentary filmmaker came to their home in the 1980s to tape an interview.

And she didn’t get much out of her mother on the subject after that encounter.

“She said to me: 'It was something that I saw that was wrong that I felt that I had to do,’ and that was it,” Harrison said.

Action taken by the General Assembly and then-Gov. Mark Warner in 2005 created momentum for the monument, the fundraising for which continues.

The Virginian-Pilot is one of the many donors to the project, which will feature bronze castings surrounding a four-sided granite block.

Depicted on the memorial will be students who staged the walkout; civil-rights leaders who supported the students’ strike; and people of different races walking together.

Sen. Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, said the monument will provide “the recognition that African Americans so rightfully deserve on Capitol Square.”

The memorial will be located not far from a statue of former U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr., one of the leaders of the Massive Resistance effort in Virginia at the time to block school desegregation.

Julian Walker, (804) 697-1564, julian.walker@pilotonline.com