After protesters toppled Confederate statues on Monument Avenue and then-Gov. Ralph Northam announced his intent to remove the Robert E. Lee monument, an NPR reporter asked me for a vision of what could take their place.
“They could be monuments to reconciliation. They could be monuments to the African American struggle, which until recent years was not told in statuary,” I replied. “They could be visions of where we want to be instead of celebrations of what we never should have been.”
With the Lee statue’s removal in September 2021, Richmond had a blank canvas to reinvent a historic street long defined by a mythology that recast subjugation and defeat as virtue and triumph. Mayor Levar Stoney had most if not all of his second term to launch a conversation about what that might look like.
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Instead, he planted and punted.
Our young people are smarter than these politicians think. They can smell the stench of rank hypocrisy a country mile away. They aren’t fooled by folks spouting platitudes about the Constitution while supporting politicians who forswear their oath to the document as they toss lit matchsticks at the First Amendment.
As he prepares to leave office, no Monument Avenue reimagining is in place beyond the plantings that some of us mistook for temporary placeholders.
“I believe that the investment from the city particularly should go into areas that need it the most,” Stoney told CBS 6. “And I look at places in Southside, as we’ve discussed for the last year, that Southside is in need. I think we should focus also on developing the area in Shockoe Bottom where the enslaved should be memorialized. ...That’s going to be the focus of my administration. There may be an administration that comes after me, my successor, that takes a different approach.”
Stoney has had nearly eight years to address the needs of Southside. We finally have the sort of blueprint in Shockoe Bottom that we could have begun fashioning on Monument Avenue. That it took a decade to get there with Shockoe shows how precious time is on projects like this.
We didn’t need millions of dollars immediately flowing into Monument Avenue, one of the most affluent addresses in RVA. But we could have started a conversation, begun formulating a plan or otherwise created a buzz around the reinvention of a historic but polarizing avenue.
We could have planted the seed for a national or international competition, harnessed the creative firepower of our own arts community, or explored what other cities might teach us.
From my perspective, the 200-foot diameter circle that once housed the Lee statue would be the perfect space to reinterpret the history of Monument Avenue, from its Lost Cause underpinnings to the 2020 protests, spurred by police violence, that brought the monuments down. We could employ historical markers, photos, artifacts and art along an accessible circle of pathways.
Smarter minds can come up with better thoughts. But the process should be democratic and as exciting as envisioned when the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts was enlisted as part of that visioning.
After all, VMFA was already part of a similar reawakening. In June 2019, its former Boulevard address was renamed Arthur Ashe Boulevard in honor of the African American tennis champion, humanitarian and native son of Richmond. And the following December, the museum unveiled Kehinde Wiley’s brilliant “Rumors of War” statue, a contemporary Afrocentric take on the former Monument Avenue statue of Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart.
But things fall apart. In April 2022, we learned that VMFA — and the $10 million from the state to facilitate this planning process with historians, architects, landscape designers, activists and community members — were no longer in play on Monument Avenue.
Amy Peck, a VMFA spokeswoman, told The Times-Dispatch at the time that the museum’s involvement in the project ended that December, right before Gov. Glenn Youngkin took office and as the state was handing ownership of the Robert E. Lee monument and the land where it stood to the city of Richmond.
“As a state agency, VMFA reports directly to the governor. After the commonwealth conveyed that property to the city ... VMFA was informed by the governor’s office that VMFA would no longer be involved with the Monument Avenue project since all of the property impacted by the project was now owned by the city,” Peck said. “VMFA was not consulted by the commonwealth or the city of Richmond on that decision.”
Ultimately, the defining feature at the former site of the Lee statue became a black fence erected around the circle. The fence was a prelude to a landscaping project that had been rejected by the city’s Urban Design Committee.
“The community deserves to be heard,” Todd Woodson, a member of the UDC, told me Monday. “I’ve heard great ideas — water features, gathering spaces, sculpture gardens. But with the size of it...we need to just take a look at what other cities have done with theirs.”
“I sure would like a conversation to open up on it. We need that conversation. I think that the city, the community has been deprived of something here.”
Access, among other things. Out of the trauma that some Monument Avenue residents experienced during the protests, including trespassers and armed individuals walking the block, a narrative has emerged that the taxpayer subsidized circle containing the Lee monument was never intended to be a public space.
As a lifelong Richmond resident, I’d never heard this. Such restricted access certainly wasn’t the case when the Lee Statue towered above the circle. It’s not lost on folks that this narrative did not emerge until protesters, many of them Black, made the circle a community space in a way it never was before the Lee monument was splashed with Black Lives Matter graffiti.
Today, the circle is home to a strange landscape garden designed to keep people at a distance. What access exists was placed there for vegetation maintenance, not visitation or enjoyment. The plantings function as a living fence.
The only way to get a true glimpse of the project is from above. At ground level, it may as well be an alfalfa field.
Monument Avenue, designed as a whites-only suburb in the late 19th century — a street where a Black worker at St. Mary’s Hospital was arrested a century later for the apparent transgression of walking its streets at night — has historically been a space of exclusion. A wonderful opportunity for Richmond to redefine the street as a template for a more inclusive and equitable community is falling by the wayside.
As a result, Monument Avenue will continue to function as designed. This reimagining required no imagination at all.
Michael Paul Williams (804) 649-6815