NEW YORK (AP) – When rioters tore through the Capitol last month, some of them holding Confederate battle flags, they didn’t come across a statue of the most famous rebel general, Robert E. Lee.
Representing the state of Virginia for 111 years as part of the National Statuary Hall Collection at the Capitol, the Lee statue had been removed several weeks earlier – one of at least 160 public Confederate symbols removed or from public areas in 2020 were moved, according to a new census, the Southern Poverty Law Center shared with The Associated Press before it was released.
The Montgomery, Alabama-based court center, which maintains a rough count of nearly 2,100 statues, symbols, signs, buildings and public parks dedicated to the Confederacy, plans to release the latest figures from its “Whose Heritage?” database on Tuesday. It follows a movement to tear down the monuments since 2015, when a white supremacist entered a South Carolina church and murdered several black parishioners.
“These racist symbols only serve to uphold revisionist history and the belief that white supremacy remains morally acceptable,” SPLC Chief of Staff Lecia Brooks said in a statement. “That is why we believe that all symbols of white supremacy should be removed from public spaces.”
Sometime after visitors and tourists are welcomed to the US Capitol, there will be a statue honoring the Barbara Johns of Virginia, a 16-year-old black girl who staged a strike in 1951 due to unequal conditions at her divorced high school in Farmville. Her actions led to the integration of US public schools by order of the court, through the landmark decision of the Supreme Court, Brown v. Board of Education.
Each state legislature can choose up to two representatives to honor in the collection of the Capitol. In December, a state commission recommended replacing Lee’s statue with a statue of Johns. Supporters told the AP that the Virginia legislature has nearly completed its elevation alongside George Washington.
Joan Johns Cobbs, Barbara Johns’ younger sister, is ecstatic about the upcoming honor. She’s also glad it hadn’t happened before January 6, when the Capitol was breached.
“You can’t imagine how sad I was to see what happened in the Capitol,” Cobbs said. ‘I said to myself,’ Oh my God. I’m glad her statue wasn’t there already. I wondered what might have happened. “
Lee’s Capitol statue, long considered offensive to black Americans, wasn’t the only one to represent a Lost Cause figure, a term referring to the belief that fighting on the side of slave owners in the Civil War was fair and heroic. Jefferson Davis, who served as President of the Confederate States of America before becoming a United States Senator from Mississippi, is one of two figures to represent that state in the Capitol.
The SPLC says there are 704 Confederate monuments left in the U.S. And taking down some of them can be difficult, especially in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee – states where lawmakers have enacted policies to protect these monuments.
The movement to remove these symbols from public space became part of the national bill on racial injustice following the maiden death of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white officer in Minneapolis pressed his knee back in the neck for several minutes. While activists have called for the lowering of the Southern flags and the downing of monuments for decades, broader pressure arose after a white supremacist shot nine black parishioners at a June 2015 Bible study meeting at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina .
“Exposing children to anything that falsely promotes the idea of white superiority and black inferiority is degrading,” said Brooks of the SPLC in her statement.
Therefore, the honor could not have come at a better time for Johns, said Cameron Patterson, executive director of the Robert Russa Moton Museum, a trustee of Johns’ estate.
Johns moved from New York City to her grandmother in Prince Edward County, Virginia during World War II. She attended Moton High School in Farmville, where, according to her memoirs, the segregated school had poor facilities, no science labs, and no gymnasium.
On April 23, 1951, at the age of 16, Johns led her classmates in a strike against the substandard conditions at Moton High, drawing the attention of civil rights lawyers at the NAACP. Lawyers filed a federal case that became one of five cases heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Brown decision. In 1954 the Supreme Court declared segregation unconstitutional.
This year marks 70 years since Johns protested. She died in 1991, at the age of 56.
“It is truly recognized that her inclusion in the Statuary Hall collection will really be a great opportunity for people to fully understand the Moton story,” said Patterson. So they don’t just learn about Barbara and who she was, they also learn about her classmates. They learn about those who continue to work in this community as it is related to the struggle for equality in education. “
Cobbs, Johns’s sister, agreed.
“I hope young people will see it as something to imitate,” she said. “Being so young, seeing injustice and deciding to do something about it is quite remarkable.”
Morrison is a member of the AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow him on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/aaronlmorrison