- A rally in support of Confederate monuments is planned in Richmond, Virginia on Sept. 16, and authorities are trying to ensure it doesn't lead to the kind of violence that took place during a white-supremacist rally in nearby Charlottesville last month.
- Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy, and its monuments are massive and include some of the oldest in the US.
- Mayor Levar Stoney ordered a city commission to consider removing the monuments after one woman was killed during protests in Charlottesville. He said
- he would not allow the city 'to be threatened by white supremacists and neo-Nazi thugs.'
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The 'capital of the Confederacy' is bracing itself for the next battle over Confederate monuments
Mayor Levar Stoney said he would not allow Richmond to be threatened by "neo-Nazi thugs" and was ordering a commission to look at removing its monuments.
The city of Richmond, Virginia, is debating the fate of some of the US's largest and oldest monuments commemorating Confederate leaders.
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RICHMOND, Virginia — Richmond is poised to become the next battleground in the contentious debate over Confederate monuments in the US.
The former capital of the Confederacy is home to some of the nation's largest and oldest monuments memorializing Confederate leaders, including Civil War Gens. Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart, and Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson; Confederate States of America President Jefferson Davis; and Confederate naval Cmdr. Matthew Fontaine Maury.
The towering bronze-and-stone statues, some of which stand more than 60 feet tall, are all clustered along a 2-mile stretch of Richmond's tree-lined Monument Avenue, a wide four-lane boulevard that cuts through the city's center.
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The National Park Service describes the road as "the nation’s only grand residential boulevard with monuments of its scale surviving almost unaltered to the present day."
A Richmond city commission has been debating the fate of the statues on Monument Avenue for months. In August, after a white supremacist rally in nearby Charlottesville left one woman dead, Mayor Levar Stoney ordered the commission to look at removing the statues — an option that had been off the table.
"Let me be clear: We will not tolerate allowing these statues and their history to be used as a pretext for hate and violence or to allow our city to be threatened by white supremacists and neo-Nazi thugs," Stoney said.
Now, a rally in support of the monument is being organized for Sept. 16 by a small group based in Tennessee. The group's "primary focus appears to be selling Confederate-themed T-shirts and other paraphernalia," and it lacks the support of Virginia's most well-established Confederate heritage group, the Richmond Times Dispatch's Ned Oliver reports. Still, counter-protests are also planned and the city is taking no chances.
"We do not want what happened in Charlottesville to happen in Richmond," the city's Police Chief Alfred Dunham wrote in a letter to residents this week, Oliver reported. Officials plan to block weapons, though it isn't clear if Virginia's open carry laws would permit them to ban guns. Cities and towns across the US are tearing down statues amid heated and sometimes violent protests against what critics say they celebrate: slavery and Jim Crow-era oppression.
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The deadly rally in Charlottesville was organized to protest the city's plan to remove a statue of Lee. A group of students in Durham, North Carolina, took matters into their own hands immediately after that rally and knocked a Confederate monument to the ground in front of the old Durham County Courthouse where it had stood for more than a century. The following night, the city of Baltimore surreptitiously removed several Confederate monuments to avoid similar protests there.
But in Richmond, a city that clings tightly to its rich history, government leaders — including Stoney until Wednesday — have tried to keep the hulking Civil War memorials standing on Monument Avenue.
To be sure, Stoney has previously said he doesn't agree with the symbolism touted by the monuments' advocates.
He has been an outspoken critic of the monuments, saying they perpetuate a "false narrative" meant "to lionize the architects and defenders of slavery" and "perpetuate the tyranny and terror of Jim Crow and reassert a new era of white supremacy."
But he has also repeatedly said he wants to find a way to preserve them while adding more "context" to the structures — in other words, make it clear through placards or other signage that the statues are historical artifacts and not meant to be shrines to the Confederate leaders they depict.
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In June, a few months after taking office, Stoney formed the commission to discuss the fate of the monuments. The group is led by Christy Coleman, the CEO of the American Civil War Museum, and Gregg Kimball, the director of education and outreach at the Library of Virginia.
The commission has considered adding signage to existing monuments and building more statues along the boulevard that celebrate a more diverse range of American leaders.
That was part of the intent behind the 1996 erection of a statue of Arthur Ashe Jr., the Richmond native who became the first African-American man to win Wimbledon. The statue is the sixth of Monument Avenue's six. The rest are Confederate leaders.
"I think we should consider what Monument Avenue would look like with a little more diversity," Stoney said during a press conference in June. "Right now, Arthur Ashe stands alone — and he is the only true champion on that street."
The commission met several times this summer, and is also holding public hearings to discuss ways to add context to the monuments.
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Many groups, including the Richmond Free Press, the city's largest black-owned media outlet, are unhappy with proposals to add context to the statues and want the city to tear down the monuments.
In an editorial, the outlet equated adding context to "putting lipstick on a pig."
"What context can possibly change the statues' meaning and message from what was meant when they were erected following a bloody Civil War fought to keep black people in bondage?" the editorial said, also asking "what can possibly change their present context as tributes glorifying racist, un-American traitors."
Some Confederate heritage groups and historians are also against the idea of adding context. They say the monuments should be left untouched.
During an August hearing, B. Frank Earnest Sr., a representative of the Virginia chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, said it's clear that the statues memorialize people who sacrificed their lives during a war, "Not some silliness about Jim Crow and trying to bring back slavery or whatever silliness they think it is," the Times-Dispatch reported.
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For now, the fate of the monuments, which were erected decades after the Civil War ended, between 1890 and 1930, is more uncertain than ever before.
"While we had hoped to use this process to educate Virginians about the history behind these monuments, the events of the last week may have fundamentally changed our ability to do so by revealing their power to serve as a rallying point for division and intolerance and violence," Stoney said in August.
The Monument Avenue statues have been targeted and even defaced by protesters in the past, but they have yet to inspire the kind of violence seen in Charlottesville.
Following the presidential election in November, protesters spray-painted "your vote was a hate crime" across two of the monuments. The day after the Charlottesville protests, hundreds of people descended on Monument Avenue chanting "tear the racist statues down."
One man climbed onto the J.E.B. Stuart statue and planted an anti-fascist flag on Stuart's horse. Now, the city is holding its collective breath in hopes that nothing like what unfolded in Charlottesville descends on Monument Avenue.
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