December 23, 2020 at 10:45am
This is an opinion column by Del. Ken Plum (D), who represents Reston in Virginia’s House of Delegates. It does not reflect the opinion of Reston Now.
Last Sunday evening Confederate General Robert E. Lee lost his position of representing the Commonwealth as part of the Statuary Hall Collection at the United States Capitol. A copy of a statue of General Lee by sculptor Edward Valentine had been standing in the Capitol since 1909 most recently in the Crypt where a statue representing each of the thirteen original states stood. General Lee’s statue was carted off just as statues of him have been taken down across the state including the huge equestrian statue of him that will be taken down from Monument Avenue in Richmond as soon as lawsuits about it are resolved.
Reply
Last Sunday evening Confederate General Robert E. Lee lost his position of representing the Commonwealth as part of the Statuary Hall Collection at the United States Capitol. A copy of a statue of General Lee by sculptor Edward Valentine had been standing in the Capitol since 1909 most recently in the Crypt where a statue representing each of the thirteen original states stood. General Lee s statue was carted off just as statues of him have been taken down across the state including the huge equestrian statue of him that will be taken down from Monument Avenue in Richmond as soon as lawsuits about it are resolved.
BY ANDREW CAIN
Richmond Times-Dispatch
Virginia removed its statue of Robert E. Lee from the U.S. Capitol overnight, the latest move in the state s purge of Confederate iconography in a year of reckoning on racial injustice.
Each state gets two statues in the Statuary Hall collection. Since 1909 Virginia s statues have depicted George Washington and Lee. A state panel last week recommended to the General Assembly that Virginia replace its Lee statue with a statue of teenage civil rights heroine Barbara Johns. We should all be proud of this important step forward for our Commonwealth and our country,â Gov. Ralph Northam said in a statement Monday.
Virginia removes Lee statue from U S Capitol overnight Monument honoring civil rights hero will replace it greensboro.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from greensboro.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Commission on Historical Statues in the United States Capitol has recommended that civil rights icon Barbara Rose Johns represent Virginia in the National Statuary Hall Collection, replacing the existing statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
Gov. Ralph Northam has also announced that his proposed budget includes dearly $500,000 to replace the statue.
“On April 23, 1951, sixteen-year-old Barbara Rose Johns led a student walkout at Robert Russa Moton High School in Farmville, protesting the overcrowded and inferior conditions of the all-Black school compared to those of White students at nearby Farmville High School,” a release said.
Her actions got the support of NAACP lawyers Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill, who took up her case and filed a lawsuit that would later be one fo five cases the United States Supreme Court reviewed in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka when it declared segregation unconstitutional.