RICHMOND -- Near a building that once served as the epicenter of "massive resistance," Gov. Tim Kaine led a groundbreaking ceremony Tuesday for a memorial to the black students and lawyers who helped end racial segregation of Virginia's public schools.

The Capitol Square Civil Rights Memorial will pay tribute to the Prince Edward County students who walked out of their segregated high school in 1951 to protest its deplorable conditions, and to the lawyers who carried their fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The ceremony drew a large crowd that included former students from the old Robert R. Moton High School in Farmville, where a 16-year-old student named Barbara Rose Johns led classmates on a strike to call attention to conditions in their school. A lawsuit filed on the students' behalf ultimately became part of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.

"Had they not believed they could change things and could find a better world, I doubt they would have done it," Kaine said.

The four-sided memorial will feature 18 figures around a large granite block. One panel will depict Johns and her fellow Moton High protesters. Another will display bronze images of Oliver Hill and Spotswood Robinson III, the attorneys who represented the students. Another will display an image of the Rev. Leslie Francis Griffin, who advised the Moton students.

"We can hardly believe that this is happening and we are grateful for it," said Joan Johns Cobbs, the younger sister of Barbara Johns. "It's a very emotional day for me, too."

Barbara Johns died in 1991, but some of her former Moton classmates watched Tuesday's groundbreaking with pride.

"Those of us who are still here try to come to these events to show our support for what the state of Virginia is trying to do to repair the damage that was done to the lives of so many young students, black and white, in Prince Edward County," said John Watson, who participated in the protest.

The privately funded memorial, created by sculptor Stanley Bleifeld, is scheduled to be installed in July on the northeast corner of Capitol Square, near the governor's mansion. At the northwest corner of the square stands a statue honoring former Gov. and U.S. Sen. Harry Byrd Sr., who bitterly opposed the Supreme Court ruling and crafted a strategy called "massive resistance" in an effort to keep Virginia's schools segregated. Prince Edward County closed its schools for five years rather than integrate them.

The memorial project began taking shape in 2005 under a commission launched by Lisa Collis, Virginia's first lady at the time. The Roanoke Times has contributed money to the project.

Kaine said the memorial will stand out on the Capitol grounds not only because it honors civil rights pioneers, but also because it celebrates youth.

"This is going to be a wonderful memorial to a time in history, but it's also going to be a place for children to come and see that they have a role," Kaine said.

Two current students at Prince Edward County High School joined Kaine and other dignitaries in a ceremonial shoveling of dirt to make the groundbreaking. Watching the ceremony was Terry Harrison, the daughter of Barbara Rose Johns, who grew up not knowing about her mother's role in the school integration battle.

Harrison said she learned of her mother's history-making activity when a documentary filmmaker arrived at their Philadelphia home in the late 1980s to interview Johns.

"She called us into the room and had us sit there, and that's how we found out what she did," Harrison said. "We couldn't believe that she kept this to herself and even after that she really didn't speak about it anymore."

Harrison said her mother probably didn't discuss the student protests because of the pressure the school crisis put on the Johns family and others in the Moton school community.

"She said to me that 'It was something that I saw that was wrong that I felt that I had to do,' and that was it," Harrison said. "And in a way that's kind of how she was. If she saw an injustice, she would correct it, she would change it. She had a strong sense of right and wrong."

On the Net: vacivilrightsmemorial.org