Most of the statues on Capitol Square lacking Confederate bona fides huddle around George Washington and his bronze steed in various defensive postures, weapons at the ready.
The slender figure of Barbara Johns has staked out her own plot of land with the same fearlessness she showed as a 16-year-old more than a half-century ago.
Visitors to the state Capitol will find her at the far northeast corner of the square on a grassy stretch long occupied by three gray-haired men who served in uniforms of gray. She stands tall and poised, her hand stretched out in a silent but compelling command.
The Prince Edward County teenager is one of four black Virginians celebrated in a new civil rights memorial, to be unveiled July 21. The others are Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson, the legal team that dismantled the system of segregated schools in this state, and the Rev. Francis Griffin, a civil rights pioneer.
Johns is the emotional focal point of the sculpture, just as she became the central figure in this state's civil rights movement on April 23, 1951.
That morning, Johns and other youth led a walkout to protest crowded conditions, substandard facilities and poor teacher pay at the all-black Robert R. Moton High School. She asked Hill and Robinson to represent 450 students in a case that became part of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling.
The teenager must have felt she was fighting against the entire state of Virginia. After a cross was burned at her home, she went to live with an uncle in Alabama, where she graduated from high school. She attended college in Atlanta and later moved to Philadelphia, where she was a librarian and teacher. She died there in 1991.
Johns may not have realized this in 1951, but she was fighting for Virginia and for every child, of every color, who would attend school here.
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