WASHINGTON (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- Virginia’s statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee was removed from its post in the U.S. Capitol on Monday morning, closing a year that saw Confederate statues toppled as the nation reckoned with racism in its history and institutions.

In April, the month before the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis would set off worldwide protests against racism and police brutality, Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia signed legislation directing the creation of a commission to study the removal and replacement of the statue. (States are each allotted two statues to display in the U.S. Capitol; Virginia’s other statue is of George Washington.)

The commission’s eight members voted July 24 to recommend the removal of the Lee statue, which will be turned over to the Virginia Museum of History & Culture in Richmond.

The statue will be replaced with one of Barbara Johns, who as a 16-year-old defied school segregation in Virginia in 1951, Northam said. The governor, a Democrat, called her “a trailblazing young woman of color” who would inspire visitors to the Capitol to “create positive change in their communities, just like she did.”

Northam said in a statement Monday that the move was an “important step forward for our commonwealth and our country.” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., was present for the statue’s removal and tweeted a video of workers hoisting it down at 4:02 a.m.

The House of Representatives, in a bipartisan vote of 305-113, moved in July to purge the Capitol of Confederate statues. In June, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ordered that the portraits of four House speakers who had served in the Confederacy be removed.

Pelosi said in a statement Monday that the removal of Virginia’s statue was “welcome news,” noting that in her first term as speaker Congress removed the statue from National Statuary Hall, an ornate section of the Capitol where a select 35 statues are displayed. The statue of Lee was in the Capitol crypt, directly beneath the rotunda, when it was taken away, Kaine said.

In June, Northam ordered the removal of another statue of Lee, in Richmond. The order was challenged by local residents, but a state judge ruled in October that the monument could be taken down.

That statue, on Monument Avenue, became a site of protest during the summer, with images of Harriet Tubman and George Floyd projected on it. The statue’s base was marked with graffiti and messages like “Stop killing us” and “Defund the police.”

The removal of yet another Lee statue, in Charlottesville, Virginia, was opposed by white supremacists who held a rally in 2017 that led to the killing of a counterprotester, Heather Heyer. A white supremacist, James Field, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison for driving his car into a crowd, killing Heyer and injuring others.




At the time, President Donald Trump said of the rally that there had been “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.” White supremacists praised his comments.

Trump had threatened to hold up this year’s defense authorization bill over a provision — which had garnered strong bipartisan support — to strip the names of Confederate leaders from military bases. (The House and the Senate overwhelmingly passed the bill this month, defying the president’s veto threat.)

The president has called the removal of monuments to the Confederacy “foolish,” tweeting in 2017: “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.” (That the toppling of Confederate monuments is an attack on American culture is a sentiment that has been echoed by various members of the Republican Party; one state senator-elect in Arizona criticized the statue’s removal on Monday, tweeting, “They are coming after all of us.”)

President-elect Joe Biden said in June that Confederate monuments “belong in museums; they don’t belong in public places.”

The statue of Johns will join one of Rosa Parks in the Capitol. The Parks statue stands in Statuary Hall but is not affiliated with a specific state.

Johns organized a walkout for her all-Black school of 450 students, who were crammed into a single-story building in Farmville, Virginia, that lacked a gym, a cafeteria and laboratories. The protest preceded the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott by four years.

She had gathered the student body in the auditorium by forging a note to teachers, ostensibly from the principal, instructing them to bring the students there, Johns’ younger sister, Joan Johns Cobbs, told The New York Times in 2019.

When the students arrived in the auditorium, “there was no principal there, and instead it was my sister on the stage,” Cobbs said. Johns died of bone cancer in 1991 at 56.

When some classmates said they were afraid of punishment by school officials, or even arrest, for the walkout, Johns told them: “The Farmville jail isn’t big enough to hold us.”

The students did not return to school for two weeks, waiting for their demands for a bigger and better building to be met. The superintendent instead threatened that the students’ parents would face trouble if they did not go back to school.

The NAACP took on the case, shifting its focus to integration rather than a new building. The organization consolidated the case with four others into what would become the landmark school segregation case Brown v. Board of Education.

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