Richmond says good riddance to shameful symbol
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA—It hung there in the air for a few moments, a man sitting on a horse, wrought out of more than 10 tonnes of bronze and standing 14 feet tall, hoisted by a crane from the pedestal where it had stood for the past 131 years.
Here in the city that had once been the capital of the Civil War Confederacy, Monument Avenue long paid tribute to a host of the leaders of that slaveholderstate rebellion. Empty pedestals now stand in the surrounding blocks where tributes to Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, J.E.B. Stuart and Matthew Fontaine Maury were removed last year.
The oldest and largest, a likeness of Gen. Robert E. Lee erected in 1890, was also the last, on its way out as it hovered there in the air around 9 a.m. Wednesday. A crowd of several hundred people started applauding and cheering as it was slowly lowered to the ground.
“Na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na, heeeeeeey, goodbye!” some sang.
“I was thinking in bed yesterday, this is the last night this stone racist will be standing there,” a woman pressed against the fence in the viewing area said to those crowded around her, as they watched and took photos. “Metal racist, I guess. It’s history.”
History, it is that. In the sense that it is gone, finished, no longer around. And also in the sense that the statue marked the longtime celebration of a chapter in U.S. history that most Americans, even those in the south, have come to realize is deeply shameful — a war launched explicitly to preserve the racist enslavement of human beings, by those intent on founding a new nation based on continued enslavement. The shocking thing is that these statues — and dozens like them across the U.S. South — stood this long, or at all.
“We have to fight to get these symbols out. We have to fight against white supremacy. Germany learned that lesson; you don’t see statues of Hitler in that country. America needs to learn that lesson,” said Lamonte Rigmaden, an army combat veteran who served in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan, and who showed up carrying a Black Lives Matter flag to watch the statue come down.
“This is huge. This is huge, you’ve got to understand that I drove down to work every day and I saw a huge Confederate flag hanging off the (interstate highway) 95. You know how demoralizing that is, to see this damn flag that really stands for white supremacy and slavery? So to see this Confederate general and what he stands for brought down is huge.”
Rigmaden and others had arrived early, some before dawn, to secure spots behind the fencing that opened up at 8 a.m. to allow the public to see the removal process on the closed-off streets surrounding the monument. The work went surprisingly quickly. Workers on cherry-pickers spent about 45 minutes hanging straps around the statue, and then cutting at the place where the bronze stood on the 60-foot-tall stone base.
Distracted members of the public were idly chatting in the sunshine of the warm day when one of the workers began gesturing wildly with his arms, raising them to the sky. Then the statue lifted up slowly, paused a few moments before it swung out to one side, and was lowered to the ground. There, it was cut in half — the Lee figure severed at the waist — for transport to storage. The base, covered in spray-painted Black Lives Matter slogans in bright colours after more than a year of protest, will remain in place for the time being, while authorities decide what to do with it and with the rest of Monument Boulevard. Today, the only remaining statue on a street that was once lined with them is of Arthur Ashe, the Black tennis star who died of AIDS in 1993.
The Lee statue, and the other Confederate monuments here in Richmond, stood as a tribute to the city’s place in southern lore as the centre of a lionized failing rebellion. Even as the politics of the state changed in recent decades — from red to purple to deep blue in the coding of U.S. partisanship — there was little talk of removing them. Even when the proposed removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 led to a white nationalist riot that claimed the life of an anti-racist protester (and led to a controversy when Donald Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides”), there was no official movement to take them down.
But the nationwide protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020 shifted the discussion, and in June 2020, Gov. Ralph Northam announced the Lee statue would come down. A year of court battles by some Virginians who wanted them to remain in place ended last week when the state Supreme Court ruled the Lee statue could be removed.
Richmond resident Emily Gaidowski was at the protest against white nationalists around the Lee statue in Charlottesville in 2017 — where she carried a sign reading “F--these statues” (with the profanity spelled out). She brought the very same sign to Monument Avenue on Wednesday morning. “I loudly sobbed the whole time I was watching, I never thought I would see it happen,” Gaidowski said. Growing up in Richmond, the Confederate iconography was an unchanging part of the city streetscape. “It’s really nice to see these racist monuments come down.
“It’s not real change, it’s more symbolic, but it’s a really beautiful thing to watch,” she said. “You take today to enjoy it, and then tomorrow remember it’s just symbolic and real change needs to be made.”