Steven Weitzman, a leading figure American public art, has already sculpted abolitionist Frederick Douglass and former Washington Mayor Marion S. Barry Jr.

Now the 71-year-old Maryland-based artist has been chosen to immortalize Black teenage activist Barbara Rose Jones in a bronze statue in the U.S. Capitol.

Mr. Weitzman was announced Wednesday as the winner of the competition to create the statue of Ms. Johns, who led a student walkout from an increasingly decrepit high school in Farmville and paved the way for the successful legal attack on government-enforced racial segregation of public schools.

Portsmouth state Sen. L. Louise Lucas, chair of the Virginia Commission for Historical Statues in the United States Capitol, noted that Mr. Weitzman was the unanimous choice during a meeting of the commission in Richmond.

“His obvious passion for this project and his articulation of Barbara John’s legacy evoked an emotional response from the commission,” Sen. Lucas said. “After his moving presentation, the decision to offer this commission to him was quickly and easily reached.”

Mr. Weitzman, the son of a graphic artist who began his professional art career in 1971, is excited about the project that will recognize a young woman who “led an extraordinary act of non-violent civil disobedience which helped to ignite the American Civil Rights Movement.

“As was the case for numerous Black youths of the Jim Crow era,” he continued, “this brave young woman has not been celebrated in the great halls of America until now.”

Well known for the work in creating public art, Mr. Weitzman’s proposed concept depicts Ms. Johns as a 16-year-old standing on a school stage, beside a lectern. The spines of books can be seen beneath the wood floorboards and Johns is holding a book in her uplifted hand.

During the meeting, Mr. Weitzman promised that members of the Johns family would serve as consultants to ensure he develops an accurate likeness of Ms. Johns when she led the strike.

Once the commission approves the final design has been approved, the concept will be submitted to the Architect of the U.S. Capitol and Congress’ Joint Committee on Libraries for final approval.

In 2020, Ms. Johns, now deceased, became the commission’s choice of a Virginia hero to replace the statue of slavery-defending Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in the Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. The general had long been one of two statues representing the state until the late Congressman A. Donald McEachin, among others, began raising concern, calling the Lee statue a symbol of division, oppression and racism. The other statue honors the nation’s slave-holding first president, George Washington, which remains. The General Assembly approved the choice of Ms. Johns and also allocated nearly $500,000 to cover the cost. The commission then went through a lengthy selection process.

Ms. Johns, who went on to become a librarian in Philadelphia before her death in 1991, organized and led the protest in a bid to call attention to the decaying building she and other Black students had to attend and to generate support for a modern building comparable to the one white students attended.

Instead, the two NAACP attorneys from Richmond, Oliver W. Hill Sr., and Spottswood W. Robinson III, persuaded parents and other adults to use the Farmville situation in a federal lawsuit to overturn the “separate but equal” doctrine that allowed educational disparity.

The case they filed and four others became part of the 1954 landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kans., that barred government-enforced separation of children by race in school.

Ms. Johns left the area after white supremacists burned the family’s home in Farmville after the decision was handed down.

Virginia has previously honored Ms. Johns in a monument celebrating the Civil Rights Movement that stands in Capitol Square in Richmond. A building in the state’s capitol complex also has been named for her.