I was in Richmond, Virginia in 2020 when thousands of protesters desecrated the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and later cheered as it was torn from its pedestal. I watched in horror that summer as all of the Confederate monuments, from J.E.B. Stuart to Stonewall Jackson, were removed, one by one, from the tree-lined Monument Avenue, the most historic and beautiful thoroughfare in all of Virginia. Meade Skelton, a Christian nationalist songwriter whose southern gospel–themed tunes had found a small but not insignificant audience in the River City, attempted to stop the removal of Jackson’s statue; he was mocked and then led away by police who, more than anything, sought to protect Skelton from what had become a rabid and determined group of protesters that summer.
And so it went. The vestiges of old Richmond were plundered one by one until only ghosts remained. The scars of that summer are still etched into the red bricks that dot the city’s Fan neighborhood. Just yesterday, as I crisscrossed the affluent zone full of niche eateries and cool record stores, I spotted a faded “ACAB” (“All Cops Are Bastards”) graffito scrawled along the side of a building on Strawberry Street. Next to the faded white spray paint was another tag that read, ironically enough, “Love or Perish.”
Those two seemingly conflicting ideas, of peace and rebellion, nestled neatly next to one another, sort of sum up the Richmond I came to know best when I lived there. The city had been my youth and walking across Monument Avenue in the early morning with the fog hanging heavy above Lee and Jackson and Stuart, my birthright. But all things must pass, and pass they did amid a backdrop of national angst following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
The statues were removed, one by one, and without a vote. But looking back, I suppose the people of Richmond did vote, with their signs and graffiti and bare presence during the hot and humid summer days when tens of thousands descended upon Monument Avenue to call for the renewal of Richmond. And renewed it has become. In the five years since the monuments were taken down, Richmond has come to be seen as the jewel it always was, at least in my eyes. After the monuments left, the contractors and private investment firms swooped in, turning the once-dilapidated neighborhoods of Scott’s Addition and Manchester into burgeoning new centers for housing, food, and entertainment. In came the cookie-cutter breweries and high-rise apartments, out went the deep-seated history that had set Richmond apart from other Southern cities on the rise.
It’s a sad story, depending on who you talk to. I was angry for quite some time before I came to see it straight for what it was: My Richmond had changed forever, and so had the greater United States. For many of those who call the state’s liberal capital home, the removal of the statues was the great crowning achievement of a life’s work. For decades the presence of Lee atop his horse Traveller had prompted debate and outcry from residents who recognized that the Richmond of old was moving into a different present—becoming a hyper-diverse bastion of progressive politics, whether some of us liked it or not.
It’s been nearly six years since Lee was cut in half, removed from his pedestal, and melted into oblivion for the country and the world to see. The project to wipe the slate clean of all our nation’s memories has only advanced in the years since. Though some battles are being waged in the Shenandoah region of the state to retain the essence and history of old Virginia, such attempts are now few and far between. More common these days is quiet resignation, especially from conservative leaders, who recognize that the fight to preserve our historical rarities is long lost and now remains only the future.
Never was this reality more clear than in the U.S. Capitol last Tuesday, when a bust of Lee that had stood in Emancipation Hall for more than a century was replaced by a bronze statue honoring Barbara Rose Johns, a civil rights leader who, at 16 years old led, a strike demanding equal education for her and her fellow black students studying at R.R. Moton High School in Farmville, Virginia. Lee’s 11-foot statue was ordered removed by then-Gov. Ralph Northam (D-VA) at the height of America’s racial reckoning in the winter of 2020 only months after Monument Avenue had been similarly scrubbed.
A bipartisan group of politicians, led by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA), and Virginia’s incoming Democratic governor Abigail Spanberger attended the unveiling ceremony.
“We are here to honor one of America’s true trailblazers,” Johnson said. “A woman who embodied the essence of the American spirit in her fight for liberty and justice and equal treatment under the law, the indomitable Barbara Rose Johns.” Youngkin and Spanberger clapped and smiled as a group of Democratic and Republican politicians marveled at the new statue.
That event was the culmination of a national cultural project that began in Richmond in the summer of 2020. No revolution is complete without artwork to tell the story; the replacement of Lee in Richmond and in our nation’s capitol speaks to a time that has come and gone, to a history that has been fully rewritten. In the words of the Band’s Robbie Robertson, “There goes Robert E. Lee.”
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