Civil rights memorial unveiled Monday

By Bob Lewis
Associated Press
Published: July 22, 2008

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — For the first time Monday, statues of black children and civil rights leaders were placed alongside statues of some men who had worked to deny racial equality on the lawn of what was once the Confederate Capitol.

Thousands of people watched as the statues honoring those who struggled for equality was dedicated just steps from the Capitol that was the seat of Confederate government.

As the gray drape that shrouded the massive granite-and-bronze memorial was pulled away, it was too much for Roderick Johns.

His chin quivered and tears merged with beaded sweat when he saw the featured likeness of his late sister, Barbara Johns. As a 16-year-old Robert R. Moton High School student in Farmville, 65 miles from Richmond, she defied threats and worked to organize a student walkout in 1951 to protest the all-black school’s cramped, dilapidated conditions. She died in 1991.

``I remember they burned a cross in the yard,‘’ said Roderick Johns, who now lives in Temple Hills, Md.

``I never thought in my lifetime that I’d see this,‘’ Johns said, standing next to the bronze of his sister as a schoolgirl, shown striding forward — left arm extended before her and her right shielding a child behind her.

Inscribed in granite above her are her own words recalling those daunting days: ``It seemed like we were reaching for the moon.‘’

The plight Moton’s students, relegated to learn from sparse faculty in classrooms that leaked during storms, got cold in winter and were stifling in the August swelter, was taken up by legendary civil rights lawyers Oliver W. Hill and Spottswood Robinson.

Their lawsuit challenging the separate and unequal conditions under which they were educated became one of the cases that led to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that struck segregated public schools.

On one face of the rectangular monument are the likenesses of the two attorneys.

Oliver W. Hill Jr. stood beside the statue of his father, who died last fall at age 100. He pondered it, a nearby building named for his dad and the prospect of a black man being elected president this fall and marveled.

``I do think this is going to be a turning point in Virginia history,‘’ Hill said.

Authorities estimated nearly 4,000 people attended the event, a handful of whom were treated for overheating. Hundreds watched on closed-circuit television in the air-conditioned committee rooms in the Capitol and nearby legislative office building.

The clash of the state’s past to its present was stark. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine called it a shining moment in ``the tragic but triumphant history of our commonwealth.‘’ Virginia Tech English professor Nikki Giovanni, whose poetry famously inspired her grieving campus the day after last year’s massacre, called the monument ``a celebration of the road we have traveled.‘’

The monument, with its images of children, was inspired by a question raised in 2002 by the daughter of then-Gov. Mark R. Warner. Then 7, she asked her mother, Lisa Collis, during a stroll of the Capitol grounds why all the statues were of white men, including Confederate Gen. Thomas J. ``Stonewall’‘ Jackson and William ``Extra Billy’‘ Smith, the state’s Civil War governor.

``She turned around and asked me why wasn’t Rosa Parks here,‘’ Collis said. ``The civil rights movement and its heroes were nowhere to be found on Capitol Square. And know-it-all mom that I am — or not — I realized I couldn’t explain why to my child.‘’

Calvin Nunnally, 61, was a child himself when Barbara Johns led the Moton High walkout. Years later, his schools were closed when the state tried to defy federal desegregation orders. Because of the shutdowns, he graduated from high school at age 21. On Monday, Nunnally said, the pain he still feels mixed with the pride of celebrating a monument he never believed he would see.

``I thought I’d forgotten it or repressed it, but this day brings it all back,‘’ said Nunnally. ``There’s this little voice in me that says, ‘You were robbed of something, you were cheated out of something you’ll never get back.‘’‘

``This isn’t a panacea. It doesn’t make everything OK. But this is historic. It is a great step,‘’ he said.