Since 1890 a statue of General Robert E. Lee has stood on Monument Ave., in Richmond, Virginia erected as a monument to Lost Cause mythology. Governor Ralph Northam has ordered it to come down as soon as possible, while opposing groups are fighting to keep it in place. Two Richmond residents and professors of history — one African American, one white — reflect on the power and potential of this moment.
By Michael Dickinson, who used to live on Monument Ave
The statue of Robert E. Lee may be the latest in a series of Confederate Monument removals taking place after the tragic murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. This will certainly prove a contentious battle as numerous lawsuits have been filed to halt the removal. For many of Richmond’s African American residents, the effort holds particular significance. The Lee monument was the first of the Confederate monuments erected along what is now Monument Avenue. In many ways, the statue symbolizes the deeply entrenched and lasting legacy of the Confederacy and white supremacy in the city. Though I am not from Richmond, it has been my adoptive city, which I happily call home, for the past four years. As an African American man and a historian, I understand the renewed calls for its removal. As a former resident of Monument Avenue, I understand how this monument and others like it provide insight into the separate realities that face Blacks and whites.
Relics to the Confederacy act as lightning rods for racial tensions which fester under the surface, easy enough for white residents to ignore between racial flashpoints. This was a central motive for erecting the monuments all those years ago. In the Jim Crow South, structures like the Lee monument became commonplace — exercises in historical erasure and power reclamation. As the generation of Confederate soldiers died off in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, their loved ones worked to honor their legacy. While seemingly harmless at first glance, this legacy maintenance was built upon the deliberate rewriting of history. These monuments along with false narratives in historical textbooks claimed that Confederate soldiers fought for noble pursuits like states’ rights and preserving Southern culture instead of fighting to secure the futures of slavery and white supremacy. To be fair, these were half-truths. The South did fight to preserve the Southern way of life and maintain the autonomy of state power, to the extent that both related to slavery and white supremacy. These motivations were clear then, and Confederate leaders did not mince words about their motives at the time.
There is a human element within the insidious nature of historical re-writing around the Civil War. White Southerners were faced with the challenge of acknowledging that their relatives readily fought and died to maintain the systematic exploitation and marginalization of Black people. Instead, most chose to rebrand. The truth has the power to sting us all, but within that sting lies the hope of moving forward.
While reframing the Confederate narrative, the monuments simultaneously served an intentional, even more insidious purpose. As federal troops left the South in the 1870s, many white Southerners worked to reclaim dominance within the states and upend the progress made by Black leaders after the war. Using fear, whites terrorized African Americans into submission throughout the Jim Crow Era effectively suppressing Black voting and civil rights through racial violence. It was this historical legacy that the modern-day civil rights movement sought to address, and is what current protests seek to remedy. Confederate monuments in Richmond and elsewhere in the country were center stage amidst Southern efforts to reassert white dominance during the Jim Crow Era. In addition to preserving an idealized narrative of Southern nobility in the war, they also acted as massive, imposing physical reminders for African Americans about who was in power.
It is with this background in mind that many African Americans interact with — but more often avoid — Confederate monuments. When I moved to Richmond, Monument Avenue was a peculiarity in my mind. My parents were always notably apprehensive on the rare occasions when we encountered the Confederate battle flag, but I grew up farther north, where monuments to the Confederate cause were rare. My first year in Richmond, wanting to live close to my university, I rented a place directly outside Robert E. Lee’s monument with what could only be described as an unease blended with intellectual curiosity and pride — pride that, because of the struggles of my ancestors, I was able to inhabit a space and a position beyond their wildest dreams and above the ceilings of achievement which men like Lee effectively worked to preserve. But despite this pride, the unease constantly remained.
I regularly saw how the city’s white residents interacted with these public spaces in harmony: taking photographs, having picnics, taking leisurely walks, and the like. I watched these interactions with the complex understanding that these statues were created to remind residents like me of our place in society. I know many white Southerners see these pieces of architecture as harmless reminders of history, but as a Black man, regardless of how much I tried, such a perspective proved difficult for me. This was particularly true for Monument Avenue, an affluent area where the barriers of economic inequity are clear as the vast majority of Black residents cannot afford to live there. So, I was not surprised by the occasional eyebrow raised at me nor was I shocked when I interacted with a neighbor who refused to reciprocate my “hello” in passing. See, as someone of African descent and as a historian, I understood that in the shadow of these monuments of slaveholders and proslavery advocates, I was not meant to feel comfortable, for they were meant to serve as reminders that I did not belong — that I was meant to follow not lead — that my presence was tolerated but not particularly welcome — that I did not belong.
By their very definition, monuments are meant to celebrate the actions and values of a society. It’s telling that Southern states have far more structures honoring figures who encouraged inequality than those who fought against it. To see these monuments as harmless is to ignore their historical genesis and the continued voices of African Americans who have long vocalized the discomfort and anguish they inflict. In response to claims that they remain innocuous, we have only to look to the recent defacing of the Arthur Ashe statue at the end of Monument Avenue: the only statue along the thoroughfare not erected to figures who were willing to die rather than grant equality to African Americans. The statue of Richmond’s native son was the target of vandalism because, while often simple to dismiss or ignore, the insidious racial tensions that lie within and beyond spaces like Monument Avenue rear their head at moments of potential racial progress.
After the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others, we are reminded that Black Americans confront a very different America than their white counterparts on a regular basis as systemic racism and inequity pervade our lives. Confederate monuments, like that of Robert E. Lee, have rightly become part of this conversation. It’s important, however, to highlight that this is not merely a difference in experience or perceived meaning. History clearly communicates that these sculptures were rooted in racial oppression, whether we want to acknowledge that history as a society is up to us. While removing these sculptures are, perhaps, tangible moves toward racial progress, more difficult will be efforts to remove the racial oppression they helped perpetuate. If such a comparatively minor step requires such a Herculean undertaking, the road toward a systemic change of equity promises to be an incredible climb, similarly arduous but far from impossible.
by Gregory Smithers
I've lived in Richmond, Virginia for almost ten years, teaching and writing about racism in American history at Virginia Commonwealth University. I often talk with my students about the power of racial symbols. In Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, those discussions invariably lead to conversations about the Confederate statues that flank our campus.
Confederate statues retain a powerful hold over the city. So, when Governor Ralph Northam announced his decision to remove the Robert E. Lee statue from its stone pedestal “as soon as possible,” the decision was greeted by many Richmonders with cheers. For the hundreds of thousands of people who’ve descended on Lee’s statue to call for racial justice over the past month, Northam’s decision was seen as a victory for historical truth, a victory for decency, and a victory for freedom.
Of course, not every Richmonder sees things that way. A small group of Monument Avenue residents have filed suit to halt the removal of Lee’s statue and prevent the “loss of favorable tax treatment and reduction in property values.” White privilege won’t yield to calls for racial justice, something vandals also made clear when they spray-painted “white lives matter” on the pedestal to Arthur Ashes’ statue.
Lee’s statue has cast a dark shadow over Richmond for well over a century. Part of the city’s grand plan in the 1890s to create “the Champs-Élysées of the South,” Monument Avenue was marketed as a prestige neighborhood for “whites only.” By the 1920s, the Lee statue on Monument Avenue was joined by statues to J.E.B Stuart, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and Matthew Fontaine Maury. These statues celebrated white men who guided the South through the Civil War and fought to extend the life of racial slavery — and in Maury’s case, to spread the American South’s version of slavery into Central and South America. Through secession and war, the men immortalized on Monument Avenue devoted their lives to keeping Black people in the chokehold of slavery.
Now, their time’s up. It was actually up a long time ago. It ended in April 1865 at Appomattox Court House, only to be reborn with the historical fictions created by the authors of the Lost Cause. For too long, groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy peddled ahistorical stories about the “war of Northern aggression” and “state’s rights,” teaching generations of school children an alternative history that ignored facts and archival evidence. By the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the Lost Cause mythology and Confederate statues again became rallying points for white Virginia’s “massive resistance” to the greatest freedom movement of the twentieth century.
The proposed removal of Lee’s statue is an opportunity. It’s a chance for freedom to break through the dark clouds of oppression that the statues on Monument Avenue cast over us every day. But to get to that better freedom – a freedom that reflects our historical and contemporary diversity – I hope that after the Lee statue is removed we can pause, stand together, and look at those empty pedestals.
Empty pedestals are powerful symbols. In Prague during the Cold War, an empty pedestal that once supported a statue to Czechoslavak president Tomas Masaryk reminded people living under Soviet rule that they would one day emerge from the oppressiveness of an authoritarian regime.
Empty pedestals can serve a similar function in Richmond, and around the country. History won’t be erased after Lee’s statue joins the recently toppled statues of former Confederate president Jefferson Davis and the Italian navigator Christopher Columbus. For centuries, these structures supported white supremacy and obscured historical truths. Empty pedestals represent opportunities for us to grapple with history’s light and darkness. They are invitations to empathize with the perspectives of people previously marginalized from the interpretation of the past. As Edward Ayers, the Tucker-Boatwright Professor of Humanities at the University of Richmond told me, “What matters now is what we all do with what remains. We don’t have a blank slate or a clean sheet of paper on which to draw our plans, but history never does.”
When the Lee statue comes down, don’t look away. Stay and look upon the empty pedestal and let’s start doing the hard work of grappling with Virginia’s complex history. Together, let’s reflect on the ground upon which the Lee statue once stood. After all, that empty pedestal sits on land stolen from the Powhatan people during the seventeenth century. This fact needs to open an honest reckoning with the nature of settler-colonial societies. In Virginia, that means reflecting on the English invasion of the Commonwealth and the strategies that colonizers used to drench the landscape in the blood of indigenous men, women, and children as a scorched earth approach to Native American elimination moved westward through the American South.
Think too, about Lee’s empty pedestal representing the lives and suffering of enslaved people who built Richmond. Their freedom was stolen from them when slave traders and plantation owners bought and sold Black bodies from auction houses that dominated Broad Street and other sections of the city.
And while you’re looking at that empty pedestal, think about the Klansmen who used Confederate monuments to galvanize their white supremacist movements. Think about the politicians who invoked the Lost Cause to justify Jim Crow segregation. And don’t forget about their modern impersonators. Think about the so-called Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 or the loose coalitions of right-wing extremists — like the Boogaloo movement — who in the past month have attempted to sabotage peaceful protests throughout the country.
Look at Lee’s empty pedestal and know that history isn’t some dead letter. The past has structured our present, but it doesn’t need to determine our collective futures. This was the message Jacki Thompson Rand shared with me. A historian at the University of Iowa and citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Rand said, “The United States rose on the bodies of Indigenous and Black peoples. Both peoples are due justice.” Richmond is a microcosm of that history; we now have an opportunity to honor those histories through our public commemorations and political actions.
Empty pedestals are powerful. They're symbols of our possible futures as much as they can spark honest conversations about the past. In the early twentieth century, the United Daughters of the Confederacy called Virginia’s Confederate statues “living monuments.” That’s exactly what they’ve become in the past month. As people join together to protest the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Richmond’s Monument Avenue has become a theater for freedom, a community space for prayer, conversation, and a call for change. On the pedestal to Lee’s statue, some have come with spray paint and paint brushes in hand; they’ve scrawled their opposition to structural racism (“fuck white supremacy”), their disapproval of police brutality (“fuck12” and “ACAB”), and their hopes for the future (“Love”). That pedestal has finally become a living monument.
As we look ahead, Richmond’s empty pedestals should serve as a reminder that American history isn’t neat, and it’s certainly not finished. Emma Ito, the education and program specialist at the Library of Virginia knows this. Writing via email, she told me that institutions like the LVA have an opportunity to seize this moment and provide a safe space for people to explore “the diverse history of Virginia.”
None of us in Richmond can rewind Virginia’s history and start anew; we can face it honestly, though. That’s why I want to give the last word to John Mitchell. He saw Virginia’s history and divined its future more clearly than most in 1890. I often come back to the wisdom in Mitchell’s writings. When the Lee statue was unveiled in 1890, Mitchell, who was born into slavery and became the editor of the Richmond Planet, insisted that “He [the Negro] put up the Lee Monument, and should the time come, will be there to take it down.”
Mitchell was right. Black people weren’t allowed to attend the unveiling of the Lee statue. At the removal, that’ll change. I’ve stood at the foot of the Lee statue with my wife and two daughters as we’ve shared conversations with BLM organizers, exchanged cell phones with African American parents so we can take family photographs, and stood with people of diverse backgrounds to mourn the loss of Black people gunned down by police.
In the weeks and months ahead, I’ll look at the empty pedestal where Lee’s statue once sat and think about Mitchell. I’m also going to think about that empty pedestal as a chance for us all to embrace Richmond’s complex past and engage in an unvarnished reckoning with its history that can shape a better future – a future yet unwritten.
Michael Dickinson is an assistant professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University. He was the 2019-2020 Barra Sabbatical Fellow at University of Pennsylvania's McNeil Center for Early American Studies. His research examines enslaved black lives and communities in eighteenth and nineteenth century cities. His book Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680-1807 is forthcoming with University of Georgia Press.
Gregory Smithers is professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University and a British Academy Global Professor with the @treatiedspaces research cluster at the University of Hull. His most recent book is Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal.
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