Virginia Museum of History and Culture to add Barbara Johns statue to its collection
February 26, 2026 | In the PressThe Virginia Museum of History and Culture is preparing to unveil an addition to its collections. The maquette of 16-year old civil rights activist Barbara Johns will become part of the Richmond museum’s 9 million items and go on display Friday.
The statue will be available for public viewing for three months inside VMHC’s long-term “History Matters” exhibition while the museum decides how to display it on a more permanent basis.
Elizabeth Klaczynski, VMHC’s associate curator of exhibitions, said the maquette — a preliminary model of a larger sculpture — presents an important opportunity.
“I think a lot of people know her story, but not as many people know it as they should,” Klaczynski said. “This is a great opportunity for people to see the statue and also to learn more about her and the strike that changed America.”
In 1951, Johns was a 16-year-old student at Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville. She led a student walkout to protest the substandard conditions at the segregated Black school. The students’ stand caught the attention of lawyers from the Virginia NAACP chapter and led to the lawsuit, Dorothy Davis et al, v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Virginia.
Eventually, their case would become one of five cases reviewed by the US Supreme Court as part of its 1954 landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision declaring school segregation unconstitutional.
Johns attended Spelman College in Atlanta before graduating from Drexel University in Philadelphia. She married, worked as a school librarian and raised five children. She died in 1991.
In 2020, Virginia’s Commission for Historical Statues in the United States Capitol approved a plan to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from National Statuary Hall’s collection at the US Capitol and replace him with the young civil rights activist.
Maryland sculptor Steven Weitzman was commissioned for the job and presented the small-scale version of the Johns statue to the commission for approval in July 2023.
“You have to keep in mind, this is not a political person, this young 16-year-old in 1951,” Weitzman told VPM News in a 2024 interview. “This is when Martin Luther King was going to college. So, this is before a lot of the marches and protests.”
The mock-up — which the VMHC purchased from Weitzman for an undisclosed cost — shows Johns with her hand raised in the air, holding a tattered book titled The History of Virginia.
“This is that moment, captured of her on the stage, pleading her case to the students,” Weitzman said. “She's sort of holding education of herself with this book in her hand, making a point, mid-sentence, to try to convince her classmates to walk out.”
Virginia lawmakers and dignitaries unveiled the full-sized bronze statue of Johns to the public during a ceremony in Statuary Hall last December. Johns is the only teenager on display in the Capitol, and now represents the commonwealth alongside George Washington.
The statue of Lee, which Johns replaced, is also part of VMHC’s collection and is displayed in the museum’s “The Lost Cause” exhibit.
“It is really powerful to juxtapose these two statues,” Klaczynski said. To “allow people the opportunity to kind of think about this history and the narratives that the Barbara Johns statue is meant to replace.”
Klaczynski said she hoped visitors found inspiration in Johns’ story: “I don't think she set out to be famous or change the world, but she really did. So, what are the things that you can do as a normal person to make positive change?”
