Richmond - and Virginia's - Effort to Face Its Past and Remake Its Image

I first came to Virginia just a few years after the ruling in Loving v. Virginia which ended the state's ban on interracial marriage.  While Jim Crow laws were ostensibly a thing of the past, one would not have know it in some areas of the state, especially rural areas and Southwest Virginia, and in the state capital, Richmond.   Coming from New York State, to say I experienced culture shock is an understatement.  Decades later, Virginia and Richmond are barely recognizable when compared to when I first arrived in Virginia.  Now, largely considered a "blue state" Virginia is the only state in the Old South that has extensive LGBT non-discrimination protections and is haltingly facing it history as a leader of the Confederacy and site of the capital of the Confederate States of America and as the site (just a few miles from where type this post) where the first slaves landed in the original 13 colonies.  A lengthy piece in Politico looks at Virginia's struggle to face its racist past and Richmond's black Millennial mayor who has found himself confronted with what to do with that city's Monument Avenue, a monument to the Confederacy built in the Jim Crow era.  Here are article highlights:

RICHMOND, Va.—At noon on June 2, more than a thousand people thronged the plaza outside city hall to hold the young mayor to account.

The night before, protesters had gathered in front of an equestrian statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee on the city’s famous Monument Avenue, demanding that it come down. George Floyd had been killed in Minneapolis a week earlier, and the effects were rippling across the country. Here, in the former capital of the Confederacy, the protesters targeted the nation’s most prominent memorial to the military commander who fought to protect slavery. Police officers had responded with tear gas, claiming the demonstrators were violent, and now the people gathered in front of city hall blamed the mayor, Levar Marcus Stoney, for an assault they saw as unprovoked.

When the mayor stepped out of the government building, he was met with boos and cries of “Resign!” and “Where were you last night?” A protestor handed him a red-and-white bullhorn so he could speak over the crowd, but Stoney still had trouble making his apology heard. “It was wrong, and it was inexcusable,” he said, promising that the perpetrators of the tear gas attack would be held accountable. After listening for an hour to the citizens’ complaints and frustrations, in the hope of easing the tension, he asked to join them that evening in their planned two-mile trek from the state capitol building to the site of the memorial dedicated to the man who surrendered Confederate forces 155 years ago. With scattered applause amid a few shouts of disapproval, the crowd grudgingly obliged.

Now 39, Stoney is the youngest mayor in Richmond’s history, a Black millennial who came into office promising change and embodying a fresh face for a tradition-bound city. But as the unrest following Floyd’s death expanded to a call to pull down America’s remaining monuments to Confederate figures, he found himself in an unenviable position: mayor of the city with the country’s biggest collection of Confederate monuments.

An entire boulevard laid out here in the late 19th century was lined with enormous figures of Southern leaders, starting with Lee. Monument Avenue has long been one of the city’s top tourist destinations, presided over by the 12-ton statue of the Virginia-born general that soars 61 feet above the elegant homes of Richmond’s old white families.

After 72 hours running on little food and sleep, and cheek by jowl with citizens fed up with injustice, the mayor recalled being overwhelmed by the enormity of the pedestal and figure rising into the Richmond dusk. “I was suddenly blown away by the reason they were there,” he said, “It was to send a clear message they were still in charge no matter the outcome of the Civil War.”

Later that night, over beers at his downtown apartment, the mayor recalled, he turned to his chief of staff, Lincoln Saunders. “We have to remove those monuments,” he said.

During the past decade the 283-year-old city of Richmond has drawn young professionals who transformed the once-sleepy downtown into a magnet for trendy restaurants, hip coffee shops and art galleries. It is “a city attempting to redefine itself,” in the words of longtime political analyst Bob Holsworth. Yet, despite an influx of outsiders and its plurality African American population, Richmond remains inextricably tied to its four-year role as the Confederate capital and its long history as a center of the antebellum South.

A dozen blocks from city hall sits the discreet power center of this other, older side of Richmond. A full-length portrait of Lee and other notable Confederates line the walls of the elegant Commonwealth Club, a private organization founded by the city’s white and male elite. For well over a century, this has been where business deals were struck and legislation hatched.

“Here, when members toast ‘Mr. President,’ it is said they raise their glasses to a portrait of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy,” one reporter wrote in 1979. Women and minorities were long excluded. Douglas Wilder, the state’s first Black governor, elected in 1989, denounced it as “a racist club, a retreat from the world where social gains are being made.”

The club was founded in 1890, the same year that more than 100,000 people gathered to witness the unveiling of the Lee statue, which had been cast in Paris. The new decade marked the dawn of a grim era for African Americans. A few years earlier, Democrats had defeated a powerful coalition of Black Republicans and working-class whites and immigrants who previously had controlled the state’s General Assembly, governor’s mansion and U.S. Senate seats, as well as Richmond’s municipal government.

The victors were not the planters of the old South but a rising class of white merchants, bankers and lawyers eager to assume their mantle. In the subsequent years they rolled back impressive gains by African Americans in the wake of the Civil War. Open advocates of white supremacy, they crafted legislation that effectively prevented Black people from voting and holding office, while setting in place harsh new rules segregating the races.

Nearly all of Virginia’s more than 200 public tributes to the Confederacy, from statues to schools to U.S. military bases, were established in the four decades that followed. Richmond led the charge, and a dozen or so monuments soon dotted its prominent parks and squares. Most dramatically, the city laid out a new broad boulevard on what was then the outskirts of town with the Lee statue as its centerpiece. By 1930, five great marble and bronze memorials to prominent Confederates lined Monument Avenue, which by then was the city’s most fashionable new suburb, though one strictly off-limits to Black residents.

The city council of Charlottesville, the university town an hour northwest of Richmond, voted that February to take down its statue of Lee. A judge blocked the plan as a violation of a state law forbidding local governments from moving Confederate statues on public land without state approval. The ensuing controversy led to the “Unite the Right” rally in August 2017 that ended in numerous injuries and at least one death.

Suddenly, Confederate memorials were in the national spotlight. Stoney’s subsequent move to create a commission to study the Richmond monuments defused a potentially volatile situation.

But the panel’s recommendation to remove the Davis statue proved meaningless. Republicans were still a powerful force in the state General Assembly, and they strongly opposed all efforts to take down any Confederate monument.

Then came a pivotal moment. In statewide elections last November, Democrats gained full control of the legislature for the first time in more than two decades. They quickly passed a bill allowing counties and cities to “remove, relocate, contextualize, cover or alter” monuments, providing they went through a formal process. The bill was signed by Democratic Governor Ralph Northam in April and was set to take effect July 1.

By this spring, however, Stoney faced growing political opposition from a newly energized left. Progressives succeeded in killing a billion-dollar local development plan that he argued would revitalize a decaying part of downtown but which they saw as a giveaway to developers at the expense of needy people. Suddenly, this rising young star’s second term seemed in doubt, and several Democratic and independent rivals emerged to challenge him in the November 2020 election.

The protests following the death of Floyd, which led Northam to declare a state of emergency across the state on May 31, only heightened progressive disdain for the mayor. There was little room for awkward compromises. He needed to take a decisive stand. Stoney’s late-night decision on June 2 to take down the nation’s most prominent memorials to white supremacy placed him firmly on the side of the protestors.

There is no doubt that the mayor’s decision on June 2 upended the old Virginia custom of polite avoidance, marking a triumph for a new Virginia that no longer dodged its painful past. Moreover, what began as a temporary public safety action is likely to be permanent. By the time a judge ordered the city to halt removal of the statues, in response to a lawsuit brought by an anonymous Virginian, it was too late. All the Confederate monuments on city land, with the exception of A.P. Hill, were tucked away behind the high fence surrounding the city’s sewage treatment plant. And on August 3, the city council unanimously agreed to remove the statues permanently, an important step in the process required by law. Stoney is confident the remaining requirements will be completed soon, neutralizing the lawsuit threat by September.

His final first-term challenge may be to reshape how Virginia’s capital memorializes its fraught heritage. Monument Avenue today is punctuated with eerily empty pedestals colorfully spray-painted with social-justice slogans; but what it will look like going forward is uncertain.

Still, despite the tumult and drama of the past two months, the most commanding of all Confederate monuments in the nation remains unmoved: Robert E. Lee astride a horse atop a massive granite and marble base at the center of a grassy circle on the tree-lined Monument Avenue. It sits on a plot of land owned by the state and beyond Stoney’s control. Governor Northam wants to take Lee down, but white landowners in the neighborhood filed a suit alleging that this action would lower their property values. On August 3, a judge ordered a 90-day injunction preventing the statue’s removal. Both sides vow to fight on. Too large to be taken down by protestors, the statue and its surrounding site have since emerged as an unlikely and lively hub of communal art, activism and civic engagement. The battle to define the past, present and future of the Old Dominion—as well as that of the nation—is far from over.