When rioters tore through the U.S. Capitol last month while seizing some of the Confederate battle flags, they did not encounter 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 in the Capitol for 111 years, was removed a few weeks earlier – one of at least 160 public confederate symbols removed or moved from public spaces by 2020. , according to a new count, the Southern Poverty Law Center shared with The Associated Press before it was released.
The Montgomery, Alabama Law Center, which has dedicated a raw count of nearly 2,100 statues, symbols, posters, buildings, and public parks dedicated to the Confederacy, has the latest figures of its “Whose Legacy?” database on Tuesday. It follows a move to pick up the monuments since 2015, when a white caretaker entered a church in South Carolina and killed several black church members.
“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. “This is why we believe that all symbols of white rule should be removed from public space.”
Sometimes after visitors and tourists are welcomed into the American Capitol, there will be a statue saluting Virginia Johns Barbara Johns, a 16-year-old black girl who went on strike in 1951 over unequal conditions at her secluded high school in Farmville . Her actions led to a court order for the integration of public schools across the U.S., via the Supreme Court’s ruling, Brown v. Board of Education.
Each state legislature can elect up to two representatives to honor in the Capitol’s collection. In December, a state commission recommended replacing Lee’s statue with a Johns statue. Supporters told the AP that Virginia’s lawmaker had almost completed her increase alongside George Washington.
Joan Johns Cobbs, Barbara Johns’ younger sister, is ecstatic about the upcoming honor. She is also glad that it did not happen before January 6 when the Capitol was violated.
“You can not imagine how sad I was to see what was happening in the Capitol building,” Cobbs said. I said to myself, ‘Oh, my God. I’m glad her statue wasn’t there yet. “I was wondering what would have happened. ‘
Lee’s Capitol statue, long considered offensive to black Americans, was not the only one to represent a figure from the Lost Cause, a term that refers to a belief that fighting slaveholders in the Civil War was just and was heroic. Jefferson Davis, who served as president of the Confederate States of America after becoming a U.S. senator from Mississippi, is one of two figures representing the state in the Capitol.
According to the SPLC, there are still 704 Confederate monuments across the US. It can be difficult to take some of them off, especially in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee – states where legislators have policies in place to protect these monuments.
The movement to remove these symbols from public spaces has become part of the national calculation of racial injustice following the murder of George Floyd, a black man who died in May last year after a white Minneapolis police officer knelt down pressed into Floyd’s neck for a few minutes. Although activists have been calling for decades to lower the flag of the Confederate countries and remove monuments, a broader pressure has been aroused after a white supremacist shot dead nine black church members during a Bible study meeting in June 2015 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 dehumanizing,” Brooks of the SPLC said in her statement.
Therefore, the honor for Johns could not have come at a better time, said Cameron Patterson, executive director of the Robert Russa Moton Museum, a caretaker of Johns heritage.
Johns went to live with her grandmother in Prince Edward County, Virginia during World War II in New York City. She visited Moton High School in Farmville, where the segregated school, according to her memories, had poor facilities, no scientific laboratories 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 attorneys to the NAACP. Attorneys filed a federal lawsuit that became one of five that the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed in the Brown ruling. In 1954, the Supreme Court declared segregation unconstitutional.
This year marks the 70th anniversary since Johns’ protest. She died in 1991, at the age of 56.
“There is a real recognition that her inclusion in the Statuary Hall Collection will be a wonderful opportunity for people to fully understand the Moton story,” Patterson said. “So they not only learn about Barbara and who she was, they also learn from her classmates. They learn from those who continue to work in this community because it is related to the struggle for educational equality.”
Cobbs, Johns’ sister, agreed.
“I hope young people will see it as something they can emulate,” she said. “Being so young, seeing an injustice and deciding to do something about it is quite remarkable.”