Confederate Statues

In 2010 a local Virginia paper published the results of a recent contest to complete the phrase, " You are very Richmond if… " The winning entry: " …Your favorite monument is Arthur Ashe because it proves Richmond isn't racist. " This problematic statement refers to Monument Avenue, a national historic landmark in Richmond, VA, famous for its grand portrait monuments honoring local Civil War " heroes, " including Confederate general Robert E. Lee and President of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis. This public space has become a defining and contentious aspect of the city's identity, functioning simultaneously as a civic commemorative space; a physical embodiment of local, regional, and national history; a site of constructed social memory; and a locus of racial tensions. In the early decades of the twentieth century the little political power held by African Americans in Richmond was stripped away under Jim Crow, and the black community as a whole was effectively disenfranchised. Early ideological challenges to Monument Avenue thus came to nothing, and later interventions, deemed " vandalism, " were quickly erased from sight. In the 1960s, amid white fear that if African Americans gained control of the city council, they would tear down the statues on Monument Avenue, Lee's monument was made property of the state, making it virtually untouchable. White politicians had taken from the African-American community the most powerful symbolic response it could have made: removing the Confederate portraits on Monument Avenue. How, then, might the resulting social narrative of white southern dominance be challenged? In 1996, after more than a century as the exclusive domain of Confederate heroes, the statuescape of Monument Avenue changed radically with the addition of a bronze portrait statue of Arthur Ashe. Ashe, a local son of Richmond, was honored for his accomplishments as an international tennis star, an author, and a humanitarian. He also happened to be black. The siting—not to mention the design—of Ashe's portrait statue generated heated debate, and its ultimate inclusion on Monument Avenue faced disapproval from a majority of both the white and black communities in Richmond. Both felt the placement of the statue was inappropriate, but for very different reasons. Its presence, however, has challenged the traditional meaning of the space as a landscape honoring the Lost Cause. Despite the counter-narrative Ashe's statue presents (and perhaps, in part, because of it), Monument Avenue remains a flashpoint of racial tension in Richmond. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the recent presidential election, the Confederate monuments in this space continue to draw small-scale interventions, often in the form of graffiti, that attempt to mediate and challenge the visual message these statues embody. The " troubling history " of this contested space and the ongoing debates surrounding its monuments provide an ideal case study for this exciting conference. My paper will explore the ways in which the (white) social narrative of Monument Avenue has been constructed, challenged, upheld, and mediated throughout its long history. Fundamental to this study is an attempt to understand how portrait monuments engage their viewers and why we respond to them in the ways we do.

"My Commander in Chief tells me there's a shortage of nation builders. That is - people who can go into other countries and show them how to access freedom and how to engage in the rule of law. People think I'm angry because while there's that, there's some ungodly amount of courthouses I see that are engaged in the process of false convictions. My Commander in Chief tells me there's a shortage of funds to equip our troops, to staff essential billets of military personnel. And I'm in a courtroom 28 times on this case and I see a number of uniformed officers engaged in the very opposite of promoting freedom. That does not make me mad. I don't have the luxury of being mad. I have to be focused. I have to get in everybody's face. That money that's being spent to maintain these courthouses, to pay Judges, to pay DA's, to pay these gentlemen in uniform, to pay nine or ten officers who would try to prevent me from reading a document to protect a little girl. No, I'm not angry. I'm in their faces and I'm telling them to get to the position of attention."