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| This sculpture by Stanley Bleifeld includes 18 bronze figures emerging from a block of granite. It sits on the ground, so people can touch it, so tourists and pilgrims can stand beside the figures to pose for photos. So children can play on it. |
Eliza asked her mother, "Where’s Rosa Parks?”
In January of 2002, Eliza’s investigation of the grassy rolling hills of the grounds of Capitol Square, which had recently become her yard, had aroused her curiosity.
The youngest daughter of Virginia’s 69th governor, Mark Warner, had noticed that among the six statues of people around what would be her home for the next four years, not only were there none honoring a female, there were none remembering the heroines/heroes of the Civil Rights Era.
“It started me thinking,” said Lisa Collis, Eliza’s mother and then Virginia’s First Lady.
Collis’ thinking eventually led her to consult with people who might help fill in the gap in Virginia’s history her daughter had innocently discovered in the statuary of Capitol Square.
On July 21, 2008, a new monument for Capitol Square was dedicated. The Virginia Civil Rights Memorial, a sculpture by Stanley Bleifeld, commemorates a turning point in history -- a 1951 student demonstration which was led by a 16-year-old girl named Barbara Johns. To protest the outrageously deplorable conditions in which they found themselves at Robert R. Moton, an all-black school in Prince Edward County, the students staged a “walk-out.”
Eventually, those students’ cause was taken up by civil rights attorneys Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson. The Moton case was folded into four other similar cases to be argued before the Supreme Court as one. The result: The 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka ended the days in which separate-but-equal could be used as the underpinning for segregation in public schools.
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