In 1951, a Black teenager led a walkout of her segregated Virginia high school. On Tuesday, her statue replaced that of a Confederate general in the U.S. Capitol.

Barbara Rose Johns was 16 when she mobilized hundreds of students to walk out of Farmville’s Robert Russa Moton High School to protest its overcrowded conditions and inferior facilities compared to those of the town’s white high school.

That fight was taken up by the NAACP and eventually became one of the five cases that the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed in Brown v. Board of Education, whose landmark 1954 ruling declared school segregation unconstitutional.

“Before the sit-ins in Greensboro, before the Montgomery bus boycott, there was the student strike here in 1951, led by Barbara Johns,” Cameron Patterson told NPR in 2020, when he led the Robert Russa Moton Museum, located on the former school grounds.

Johns’ bronze statue is the latest addition to Emancipation Hall, a gathering place in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center that houses many of the 100 statues representing each state.

Every state legislature gets to honor two notable individuals from its history with statues in the Capitol. For over a century, Virginia was represented by George Washington and, until a few years ago, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Lee’s statue was hoisted out of the Capitol — at the request of then-Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat — in December 2020, the year that a nationwide racial reckoning spurred the removal of over 100 Confederate symbols across the U.S.

The same month, Virginia’s Commission on Historical Statues in the United States Capitol voted unanimously to select a statue of Johns to replace it. Johns, who died in 1991, was chosen from a list of 100 names and five finalists, including Pocahontas and Maggie Lena Walker, the first Black woman to serve as president of a U.S. bank.

Exactly five years and a multi-step approval process later, the 11-foot statue — created by Maryland artist Steven Weitzman — has finally moved in. It shows a teenage Johns standing at a podium, raising a book overhead mid-rallying cry.

Its pedestal is engraved with the words: “Are we going to just accept these conditions, or are we going to do something about it?”

Johns is credited with helping end school segregation

Johns was born in New York City in March 1935, and moved to Virginia’s Prince Edward County during World War II to live on her grandmother’s — and later, father’s — farm.

According to the Moton Museum, Johns — the niece of civil rights pioneer the Rev. Vernon Johns — grew increasingly frustrated by the lack of resources at her school. Classrooms were located in free-standing tar-paper shacks that lacked proper plumbing, with no science laboratories, cafeteria or gymnasium at all.

She later wrote in an unpublished memoir that when she finally took her concerns to a teacher, they responded, “Why don’t you do something about it?” She felt dismissed at first, but gave the idea more thought and decided to unite the student council members to coordinate a strike.

“We would make signs and I would give a speech stating our dissatisfaction and we would march out [of] the school and people would hear us and see us and understand our difficulty and would sympathize with our plight and would grant us our new school building and our teachers would be proud and the students would learn more and it would be grand,” Johns wrote, according to the museum.

On April 23, 1951, Johns gathered all 450 students in the auditorium and convinced them to walk out, to protest their school’s conditions and campaign for a new building. The strike lasted roughly two weeks and caught the attention of the NAACP.

NAACP lawyers Spottswood Robinson and Oliver Hill filed a lawsuit (Davis et al. v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Virginia) in federal court, challenging the constitutionality of segregated education in the county’s schools.

The court ultimately sided with the county, but did order that its Black schools be made physically equal to white schools. A new Black Moton High School — known as “Moton 2” — was built in 1953 to avoid integration.

The following year, the Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Ed, based on the Farmville case and four others from across the country. But it took years for the ruling to actually be enforced throughout the U.S., especially in Virginia, which enacted a set of anti-integration laws that came to be known as “Massive Resistance.”

Prince Edward County schools were officially integrated in 1964, after being closed for five years in an attempt to avoid it. Moton 2 was reopened as the Prince Edward County High School and remained in use until 1993.

As for Johns, she was sent after the walkout to live with relatives and finish her schooling in Alabama due to safety concerns. She attended Spelman College and graduated from Drexel University before working as a librarian for Philadelphia Public Schools. She married the Rev. William Powell, with whom she raised five children before her death at age 56.

Johns has been recognized in Virginia over the years. Her story is now a required part of lessons in the public school curricula. In 2017, the Virginia Attorney General’s Offices were renamed in her honor. And the following year, the Virginia General Assembly designated April 23 — the anniversary of the walkout — as Barbara Johns Day statewide.

Johns’ sister, Joan Johns Cobbs, told member station VPM last year that their family is honored by this newest tribute in the nation’s capital.

“I think Virginia is trying to correct some of its inequities,” Johns Cobbs said. “I think the fact that they chose her was one way they are trying to rectify what happened in the past.”

Bucking a trend in 2025

Plans for Johns’ statue have been in motion since well before President Trump’s second term, which has been marked by a rollback in diversity initiatives and the reinstallment of Confederate monuments.

One of Trump’s executive orders along those lines, aimed at “restoring truth and sanity to American history,” calls on the secretary of the Interior to restore public monuments and markers on federal lands that have been changed or removed since 2020.

In October, a statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike was reinstalled in a D.C. park, five years after protesters tore it down and set it ablaze.

As is customary, state leaders and members of Congress will be in attendance at Tuesday’s statue unveiling. Among them will be House Speaker Mike Johnson as well as Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican who campaigned in part against critical race theory and has eliminated DEI initiatives in office.

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., who also plans to attend the ceremony, issued a statement beforehand praising Johns’ “incredible bravery and leadership she displayed when she walked out of Moton High School.”

“I’m thrilled that millions of visitors to the U.S. Capitol, including many young people, will now walk by her statue and learn about her story,” he added. “May she continue to inspire generations to stand up for equality and justice.”

‘Stranger Things’ Noah Schnapp
Tears Flowed After Filming Wrapped …
Finale Is Super Sad!!!

Published
December 16, 2025
4:13 PM PST

When Rob Reiner spoke with Fresh Air in September to promote Spinal Tap II: The End Continues, Terry Gross asked him about Being Charlie, a 2015 film he collaborated on with his son Nick Reiner. The film was a semiautobiographical story of addiction and homelessness, based on Nick’s own experiences.

Nick Reiner was arrested Sunday evening after Rob and Michele Reiner were found dead inside their California home.

The father character in Being Charlie feels a lot of tension between his own career aspirations and his son’s addiction — but Reiner said that wasn’t how it was for him and Nick.

“I was never, ever too busy,” Reiner told Fresh Air. “I mean, if anything, I was the other way, you know, I was more hands-on and trying to do whatever I thought I could do to help. I’m sure I made mistakes and, you know, I’ve talked about that with him since.”

At the time, Reiner said he believed Nick was doing well. “He’s been great … hasn’t been doing drugs for over six years,” Reiner said. “He’s in a really good place.”

Reiner starred in the 1970s sitcom, All in the Family and directed Stand By Me, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally and A Few Good Men. Spinal Tap II: The End Continues is a sequel to his groundbreaking 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap.

“After 15 years of not working together, we came back and started looking at this and seeing if we could come up with an idea, and we started schnadling right away,” Reiner recalled. “It was like falling right back in with friends that you hadn’t talked to in a long time. It’s like jazz musicians, you just fall in and do what you do.”

Below are some more highlights from that interview.

Interview Highlights

Carl Reiner (left) and Rob Reiner together in 2017.

Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for TCM

hide caption

toggle caption

Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for TCM

Advertisement

On looking up to his dad, director Carl Reiner, and growing up surrounded by comedy legends 

When I was a little boy, my parents said that I came up to them and I said, “I want to change my name.” I was about 8 years old … They were all, “My god, this poor kid. He’s worried about being in the shadow of this famous guy and living up to all this.” And they say, “Well, what do you want to change your name to?” And I said, “Carl.” I loved him so much, I just wanted to be like him and I wanted to do what he did and I just looked up to him so much. …

[When] I was 19 … I was sitting with him in the backyard and he said to me, “I’m not worried about you. You’re gonna be great at whatever you do.” He lives in my head all the time. I had two great guides in my life. I had my dad, and then Norman Lear was like a second father. They’re both gone, but they’re with me always. …

There’s a picture in my office of all the writers who wrote for Sid Caesar and [Your] Show of Shows over the nine years, I guess, that they were on. And, when you look at that picture, you’re basically looking at everything you ever laughed at in the first half of the 20th century. I mean there’s Mel Brooks, there’s my dad, there is Neil Simon, there is Woody Allen, there is Larry Gelbart, Joe Stein who wrote Fiddler on the Roof, Aaron Ruben who created The Andy Griffith Show. Anything you ever laughed at is represented by those people. So these are the people I look up to, and these are people that were around me as a kid growing up.

On directing the famous diner scene in When Harry Met Sally

We knew we were gonna do a scene where Meg [Ryan] was gonna fake an orgasm in an incongruous place like a deli, and Billy [Crystal] came up with the line, “I’ll have what she’s having.” … I said, we need to find somebody, an older Jewish woman, who could deliver that line, which would seem incongruous. I thought of my mother because my mother had done a couple of little [movie] things … So I asked her if she wanted to do it and she said sure. I said, “Now listen mom, hopefully that’ll be the topper of the scene. It’ll get the big laugh, and if it doesn’t, I may have to cut it out.” … She said, “That’s fine. I just want to spend the day with you. I’ll go to Katz’s. I’ll get a hot dog.” …

When we did the scene the first couple of times through Meg was kind of tepid about it. She didn’t give it her all. … She was nervous. She’s in front of the crew and there’s extras and people. … And at one point, I get in there and I said, “Meg, let me show you what I meant.” And I sat opposite Billy, and I’m acting it out, and I’m pounding the table and I’m going, “Yes, yes, yes!” … I turned to Billy and I say, “This is embarrassing … I just had an orgasm in front of my mother.” But then Meg came in and she did it obviously way better than I could do it.

On differentiating himself from his father with Stand By Me (1986) 

I never said specifically I want to be a film director. I never said that. And I never really thought that way. I just knew I wanted to act, direct, and do things, be in the world that he was in. And it wasn’t until I did Stand By Me that I really started to feel very separate and apart from my father. Because the first film I did was, This Is Spinal Tap, which is a satire. And my father had trafficked in satire with Sid Caesar for many years. And then the second film I did was a film called The Sure Thing, which was a romantic comedy for young people, and my father had done romantic comedy. The [Dick] Van Dyke Show is a romantic comedy, a series.

But when I did Stand By Me, it was the one that was closest to me because … I felt that my father didn’t love me or understand me, and it was the character of Gordie that expressed those things. And the film was a combination of nostalgia, emotion and a lot of humor. And it was a real reflection of my personality. It was an extension, really, of my sensibility. And when it became successful, I said, oh, OK. I can go in the direction that I want to go in and not feel like I have to mirror everything my father’s done up till then.

On starting his own production company (Castle Rock) and how the business has changed

We started it so I could have some kind of autonomy because I knew that the kinds of films I wanted to make people didn’t wanna make. I mean, I very famously went and talked to Dawn Steel, who was the head of Paramount at the time. … And she says to me, “What do you wanna make? What’s your next film?” And I said, “Well, you know, I got a film, but I don’t think you’re going to want to do it.” … I’m going to make a movie out of The Princess Bride. And she said, “Anything but that.” So I knew that I needed to have some way of financing my own films, which I did for the longest time. …

It’s tough now. And it’s beyond corporate. I mean, it used to be there was “show” and “business.” They were equal — the size of the word “show” and “business.” Now, you can barely see the word “show,” and it’s all “business.” And the only things that they look at [are] how many followers, how many likes, what the algorithms are. They’re not thinking about telling a story. … I still wanna tell stories. And I’m sure there’s a lot of young filmmakers — even Scorsese is still doing it, older ones too — that wanna tell a story. And I think people still wanna hear stories and they wanna see stories.