In 1951, as a 16-year-old scholar at Robert Russa Moton Excessive Faculty in Farmville, Va., Johns led 450 of her classmates in a two-week-long st
In 1951, as a 16-year-old scholar at Robert Russa Moton Excessive Faculty in Farmville, Va., Johns led 450 of her classmates in a two-week-long strike towards unequal college situations and academic sources for Black college students.
The NAACP Authorized Protection Fund finally filed swimsuit on behalf of the scholars, demanding integration of the native college system. That litigation grew to become one in every of 5 instances that mixed three years later to kind Brown v. Board of Training, and it was the one a kind of instances that originated from scholar protest.
In a joint assertion Monday, McEachin and Wexton stated the removing of Lee’s statue was a “historic and long-overdue second for our Commonwealth.”
“The Robert E. Lee statue honors a legacy of division, oppression, and racism — a darkish interval within the historical past of our Commonwealth and our nation,” they stated. “There isn’t any motive his statue needs to be one of many two representing Virginia within the U.S. Capitol.”
In June, amid nationwide protests towards racial injustice and police brutality, Home Speaker Nancy Pelosi referred to as for the removing of 11 statues depicting Accomplice leaders that have been positioned within the Capitol’s Statuary Corridor.
Pelosi’s demand was a part of a broader effort to take away Accomplice imagery from public areas, regardless of resistance from some Republicans and President Donald Trump — who has expressed help for individuals’s proper to fly the Accomplice flag and has described Lee as a “nice common.”
In her personal assertion Monday, Pelosi argued that “the statues throughout the Capitol ought to embody our highest beliefs as Individuals.”
“The Congress will proceed our work to rid the Capitol of homages to hate, as we battle to finish the scourge of racism in our nation,” she stated. “There isn’t any room for celebrating the bigotry of the Confederacy within the Capitol or another place of honor in our nation.”