Barbara Rose Johns was just 16 years old when she led her Farmville, Va., classmates in a student strike protesting unequal education. That 1951 student-led protest paved a path toward the Supreme Court and the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling desegregating public schools across the country.
On Tuesday, a bronze-cast statue of Johns — standing next to a lectern, holding a book high above her head — joined the National Statuary Hall collection in the Capitol, which allows each state to display up to two statues honoring historically significant individuals.
“She was a trailblazer and a pioneer in the fight for equal education,” Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said during an unveiling ceremony in Emancipation Hall attended by Virginia politicians and roughly 200 of Johns’ descendants and extended family members. “At the remarkable age of 16, she conceived of a single simple act of protest that would go on to shape the lives of millions of American students across the nation.”
