Richmond may set tone for fate of Confederate statues
Debate rages over changes to historic Monument Ave.
RICHMOND, Va. – When George Braxton hears people speak of Southern pride and ancestry, he recalls that the family tree for him begins on a Southern plantation with the name of a white man who bought and owned his family.
“I struggle to understand how someone would want to tie their culture and heritage with human trafficking and systematic rape and all the things associated with slavery, which was the cornerstone of the Confederate economy,” Braxton says.
Braxton and his wife, Kelly HarrisBraxton, are proud lifelong Richmonders. Kelly is the executive director of Virginia First Cities, an advocacy group, and Braxton is chief diversity officer in an agency within the Defense Department. They want the Confederate statues on Monument Avenue to come down.
“It’s disgraceful,” Braxton says. “It’s an outward, vicious, open and notorious sign of white supremacy.”
Their son Miles attended Thomas Jefferson High School, a few blocks from the monuments to Gen. Robert E. Lee, Confederate president Jefferson Davis and others. The Braxtons say children shouldn’t have to grow up with icons that commemorate slavery, white supremacy and treason a stone’s throw away.
Braxton knows what that feels like. For him, it began in high school football when the Lee Davis Confederates and Douglas Freeman Rebels ran onto the field waving the Confederate battle flag. Now, Braxton sees the battle flag every morning on his way to work off Interstate 95. He says the upside of it being dark when he’s driving home is that he can’t see it.
“To me, as a Richmonder, as an African American, they’re a slap in the face,” he says about the statues. “It’s a way of saying that no matter what you do financially, professionally, in your life socially, civicly, you may be eye to eye with me, but we have something that’s higher than you. This is something that stands above the city and looks down.”
Harris-Braxton sees the statues as gathering places for separatists, white supremacists and Nazis.
“They are building a movement around the statues. These statues are creating a new life of their own.”
Nationalists rally around Lee
“The South will rise again!” “White lives matter!”
“Jews will not replace us!” These were the chants from white nationalists and white supremacists marching in a torchlight procession at
the University of Virginia in Charlottesville on Aug. 11, 2017. The next day, the Unite the Right rally would turn deadly when a car plowed into counterprotesters, killing one and injuring 19. By the time the marches were over, 33 people had been injured and three lives lost.
The rally was sparked by the city’s decision to remove a statue of Confederate general Lee and the controversy surrounding the movement to remove tributes to the Confederacy elsewhere.
That movement picked up urgency after a white supremacist, Dylann Roof, murdered nine people during a prayer service in an African-American church in Charleston, S.C., on June 17, 2015. Roof had posed for a photograph waving the Confederate battle flag.
Harris-Braxton sees such pro-Confederacy displays as a backlash to the fact that an African American held the presidency for eight years. Barack Obama’s historic tenure inevitably unearthed deeply embedded racism and emboldened far-right groups to surface throughout the country, she says.
The events in Charleston and Charlottesville renewed national debate about the place of tributes to the longgone Confederacy. In many cities in the South, Confederate monuments, flags, plaques and memorials are being removed. Streets, parks, schools and cemeteries named after Confederate figures are being changed.
Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, is ground zero. What it does with its statues could set the tone for everyone else.
A conversation long overdue
Shemicia Bowen, who organizes Ladies Who Lead Richmond Black Restaurant Week, believes the only good thing that came out of the violence in Charlottesville was that it sparked a national and global conversation long overdue.
“Charlottesville was a tipping point,” Bowen says. “Images from across the country came down overnight. Done deal.”
Instead of symbols that racists use to promote their agenda, Bowen would like to focus on the positive images that reflect Richmond — a place she says is far bigger than the Confederate statues on two blocks of Monument Avenue.
Before the violence in Charlottesville, Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney had formed the Monument Avenue Commission to discuss adding context to the statues. After the Unite the Right rally, he shifted his position and said the city should take them down.
“Our ongoing conversation about these monuments is important,” he says. “But what is more important to our future is dismantling the presentday vestiges of Jim Crow that these monuments were erected to preserve.”