Joan Johns Cobbs was 13 and afraid as she looked onto the stage where her older sister, Barbara Johns, urged her fellow students at Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville, Va., to protest the poor conditions of their segregated Black school. Like the students around her, Cobbs was inspired to join, and the 1951 student-led strike would eventually make civil rights history.
Their student-initiated lawsuit protesting the conditions of their school would eventually become part of Brown v. Board of Education, the case that led to the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring “separate but equal” public schools unconstitutional.
A statue of Cobbs’ sister, Barbara Johns, is being built to represent Virginia in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall, replacing a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Last month, the Virginia commission tasked with leading the effort selected a sculptor and unveiled a mock-up of the coming statue, which is rife with symbols alluding to the historic strike. The mock-up shows a teenage Johns in a defiant stance holding up a book; the floorboards beneath her feet are held up by stacks of books by Black authors. Johns died in 1991, and the high school is now a National Historic Landmark and civil rights museum.