When protesters invaded the United States Capitol last month, some of them holding the Confederate battle flags, they did not find a statue of the most famous rebel general, Robert E. Lee.
The Lee statue, which represented the state of Virginia as part of the National Statuary Hall Collection on the Capitol for 111 years, was removed weeks earlier – one of at least 160 Confederate public symbols removed or moved from public spaces in 2020, according to a new count, the Southern Poverty Law Center shared with The Associated Press before releasing it.
The Montgomery, Alabama-based legal center, which maintains a gross count of nearly 2,100 statues, symbols, posters, buildings and public parks dedicated to the Confederacy, released the latest numbers from its “Inheritance from?” database on Tuesday. He has been tracking a move to topple the monuments since 2015, when a white supremacist entered a South Carolina church and killed several black parishioners.
“These racist symbols serve only to support revisionist history and the belief that white supremacy remains morally acceptable,” said SPLC team leader Lecia Brooks in a statement. “This is why we believe that all symbols of white supremacy should be removed from public spaces.”
Sometime after visitors and tourists are welcomed back to the United States Capitol, there will be a statue saluting Barbara Johns of Virginia, a 16-year-old black girl who went on strike in 1951 because of unequal conditions at her segregated college in Farmville . His actions led to justice-ordered integration of public schools across the United States, through the historic Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education.
Each state legislature can choose up to two representatives to honor the Capitol collection. In December, a state commission recommended replacing the statue of Lee with a statue of Johns. Supporters told the AP that the Virginia legislature almost ended its uprising alongside George Washington.
Joan Johns Cobbs, Barbara Johns’ younger sister, is ecstatic with the tribute to come. She is also happy that it didn’t happen before January 6, when the Capitol was violated.
“You can’t imagine how sad I was seeing what was going on in the Capitol building,” said Cobbs. “I was saying to myself, ‘My God. I am happy that her statue was not yet there. I wondered what would have happened. “
Seen for a long time as an offensive to black Americans, the statue of Lee’s Capitol was not the only one representing a figure of the Lost Cause, a term that refers to the belief that fighting alongside slave owners in the Civil War was fair and heroic. Jefferson Davis, who served as president of the Confederate States of America after becoming a United States senator from Mississippi, is one of two figures representing that state on Capitol Hill.
The SPLC claims that there are still 704 Confederate monuments in the United States. 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 move to remove these symbols from public spaces became part of the national calculation of racial injustice after the May murder of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for several minutes. Although activists have called for the lowering of Confederate flags and the collapse of monuments for decades, a broader impulse was triggered after a white supremacist shot nine black parishioners during a June 2015 Bible study meeting at the Mother African Methodist Episcopal Church Emanuel in Charleston, South Carolina.
“Exposing children to anything that falsely promotes the idea of white superiority and black inferiority is dehumanizing,” said Brooks of the SPLC in his statement.
That’s why the tribute to Johns couldn’t come at a better time, said Cameron Patterson, executive director of the Robert Russa Moton Museum, a caretaker for Johns’ legacy.
Johns moved from New York City to live with his 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, lacked science labs and had no gym.
On April 23, 1951, at the age of 16, Johns led his colleagues on a strike against precarious conditions at Moton High, drawing the attention of civil rights lawyers at NAACP. The lawyers filed a federal case that became one of five that the United States Supreme Court considered in the Brown decision. In 1954, the higher court declared the segregation unconstitutional.
This year will mark the 70th anniversary since Johns’ protest. She died in 1991, at the age of 56.
“There is real recognition that its inclusion in the Statuary Hall Collection will really be a great opportunity for people to understand Moton’s story more fully,” said Patterson. “So they are not just learning about Barbara and who she was, they are learning about their classmates. They are learning about those who continue to work in this community, when it comes to the fight for educational equality.”
Cobbs, Johns’ sister, agreed.
“I hope that young people see this as something they can imitate,” she said. “Being so young, seeing an injustice and deciding to do something about it is quite remarkable.”