Every state gets two bronze statues in the US Capitol recognizing important figures from its past. For awhile, Virginia’s representation was George Washington and Robert E. Lee.
Lee’s statue was removed in 2020 at the request of Democratic Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, in the wake of the George Floyd protests that brought down more than 100 Confederate monuments.
The other day, Virginia’s new statue went up in the US Capitol, and I think you’ll agree with me, it was worth the wait.
It’s a statue of Barbara Rose Johns, a Black woman who was 16 years old when she led a full-student-body walkout of her school in 1951 to try and force them to desegregate. The conditions in that school were literally inhumane.
Her case became one of the cases that was reviewed as part of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education case, which brought down “separate but equal”.
Agreed. That states have the authority to decide who is represented seems quaint and traditional in the current selfish, venomous climate of “leadership”.
Way to go, Virginia!
How the hell did Lee ever get chosen over Thomas Jefferson in the first place? Not that I mind Barbara being recognized, but how did a rebel leader ever get a statue in Capitol?
Don’t bother responding, it’s a rhetorical question.
Between 1890 and 1930, many of the southern U.S. states deliberately put up statues in public places in those states (and in the Capital building in Washington, D.C.) in order to annoy Black people in those states. It was White people (who were in the majority there) voting to make the Black people there feel bad. The Whites were saying in effect, “We don’t care that we lost the Civil War. We don’t care that slavery is now illegal. We’re going to say without quite saying it that we think you’re still inferior.”