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Op-Ed: What Happens Now? Monument Avenue’s Empty Pedestals

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Monument Avenue’s Confederate monuments are slated for removal, but landscape architect Annie Lynch raises a more fundamental question: when they are gone, what will we do with their pedestals?

An empty pedestal signals either an ending or a beginning.

Earlier this month, Governor Ralph Northam announced that the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee that presides over Monument Avenue will be removed. In his announcement, the Governor acknowledged that the future location of Lee’s statue will be the subject of community engagement efforts and public debate in the coming months. While the removal is currently the subject of multiple lawsuits, the state government continues to work toward the eventual removal of the statue. The fate of Lee’s vacated pedestal, however, was not addressed.

Recognizing that pedestals serve as city infrastructure is central to appreciating how Confederate monuments function in public space. Lee’s massive, sculpted base cannot be functionally distinguished from the form of the traffic roundabout; this merger is designed to blur the extent of the monument and cement this figure as immovable, like the road itself. 

Drivers trying to access downtown Richmond or the interstate are funneled around Lee’s imposing pedestal, a design that ensures that the monument effectively dictates the city’s movement. As essential transportation infrastructure, citizens are unable to avoid, challenge, or change the monument and, by association, its ideology. 

Photo by Creative Dog Media, via Instagram

We must recognize that the removal of the statue does not constitute the removal of the monument. An empty pedestal serves only to remind us that the figurative statue is but one component of a larger spatial system, designed to elevate a single historic narrative and obscure those that would counter it. 

On Monument Avenue, to stop at the removal of the monument figure may be missing an opportunity to refute the terms set by those designers, planners, and government agents who used these monuments to reinforce racial terror. Repopulating emptied pedestals with figures worthy of memorialization can address the underrepresentation of the city’s Black leaders in public space; the obvious merits of this approach have led to its adoption in many Southern cities.

Deconstructing the pedestal, however, offers a more thorough rebuke of the Confederate project. After the pedestal’s deconstruction, many may exclaim in frustration: “But the removal is not complete; the traffic circle remains!” Indeed, if we see the remaining circular patch of grass designed to support Lee’s monument as a critical component of a nefarious city-planning strategy, our site of work must expand to include the whole of Richmond.

Beginning with the deconstruction of the pedestal, the city could author an expansive definition of monumentality and memorialization that critiques broad historical narratives, honors and amplifies local forms of memory practice, and elevates the memorial qualities of lived, everyday experience.  Strategies that set a precedent for an expanded monumentality can be found in some of Richmond’s completed and ongoing projects. 

The excavation of Lumpkin’s Slave Jail in Shockoe Bottom, begun in 2005, serves as a particularly apt example of how erasure can be countered through the deconstruction of urban infrastructure. Richmond’s Slave Trail also recovers the geography of the city’s suppressed history through the creation of a network of sites that, together, constitute a living memorial to the enslaved persons brought to the nation’s largest slave port. These methods of deconstruction, recovery, and dispersal could be leveraged in Richmond’s historically Black communities such as Jackson Ward, Oregon Hill, and Carver Residential, many of which have been severely harmed by Richmond’s recent infrastructure projects.

Widespread excavations that rely on community involvement and landscape design could build off of the existing network of discovery, remembrance, and celebration of Black life in Richmond. Monument Avenue, once stripped of its pedestals, could be reconstructed to play a role in these efforts, as a site for display of excavated soil and artifacts from sites throughout the city.  

Photo by Creative Dog Media, via Instagram

For decades, the design and planning disciplines have been complicit in constructing the physical environment of racism. The removal of Confederate monuments, redefined as a city-wide project, calls upon designers and planners to work with Black communities to create a new memorial landscape that excavates obliterated spaces, and with them silenced histories.

The strategy I outline seizes upon the city and state’s renewed sense of urgency regarding Confederate monument removal and leverages it towards a more fundamental reimagining of the city’s infrastructure of memory. How might we begin to rewrite the history of Richmond without the use of pedestals and plaques? As we celebrate the remarkable progress the removal of Monument Avenue’s Confederate statues represents, we must challenge ourselves to understand this moment as only the beginning.

Note: Op-Eds are contributions from guest writers and do not reflect editorial policy.

Top Photo by Creative Dog Media, via Instagram

Peaceful Protest Movement In Richmond Continues To Grow

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Protests around the city, and into surrounding counties, have continued on a daily basis throughout this week. Here’s what it looks like on the streets.

Last night, the city got a message that many of its residents have been waiting for: Governor Ralph Northam would be taking steps to remove the Robert E. Lee Monument from Monument Avenue, while Mayor Levar Stoney sought to remove the Confederate monuments on Monument Avenue that are currently under city control.

Regardless of this massive change, one that can only be seen as a success on the part of Richmond’s protest movement, many goals of the city’s protesters remain unmet, and so people have continued to gather on the streets of the city, and even the surrounding counties. Despite a few high-profile incidents at the beginning of the current wave of nightly protests, things have largely remained peaceful, and are if anything becoming more peaceful and more focused as the days go on. The message remains focused and clear: end police killings of unarmed black people in America. Black Lives Matter.

Here are some images from the last few days of protests, captured by RVA Mag staff and contributors.

Projection by Dustin Klein, Photo by Alexis Delilah
Photo by Nils Westergard
Photo by Andre Mags
Photo by Andre Mags
Photo by Andre Mags
Photo by Katja Timm
Photo by Nils Westergard
Photo by Nils Westergard
Photo by Andre Mags
Photo by Nils Westergard
Photo by Nils Westergard
Photo by Nils Westergard
Photo by Nils Westergard
Photo by Nils Westergard

Top Photo by Andre Mags

Democrat Majority Could Bring Monumental Change to Confederate Symbols

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Under the Dillon Rule, all decisions made by Virginia localities must be authorized by the General Assembly. Thus far, the GA has not allowed Richmond and other VA cities to remove Confederate monuments. But a new Democratic majority may change all that in 2020.

Virginia has 110 Confederate monuments, many of which are housed in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy. Among the most notable are the five towering monuments of Confederate leaders lining Monument Avenue. Others live in neighborhoods across the city from Church Hill to Bellevue.

The city is home to significant Civil War buildings, including the American Civil War Museum and White House of the Confederacy. Street names such as Confederate Avenue inhabit the Northside, while Jefferson Davis Highway, named for the president of the Confederacy, runs along the city and throughout the state. Schools such as John B. Cary Elementary — named after a Confederate soldier who later served as his district’s superintendent — and George Mason Elementary — named after a slave-owning Founding Father — still exist, even though concern for renaming the schools has been articulated. 

In recent years, residents have been pushing for the Monument Avenue monuments to come down. But the statues, which represent the dark and violent history of slavery for some Virginians and their families, stand tall, staring down the median of a prominent and busy avenue. This is in part because the power to remove the monuments has been denied to localities under the Dillon Rule, which allows the state to limit the powers of local governments. However, a new Democratic majority in Virginia’s state legislature may open the door to more local government control — and perhaps the removal of the monuments.

The Dillon Rule is derived from the 1868 written decision by Judge John Dillon of Iowa. Dillon identified local governments as political subdivisions of the state government. According to the American Legislative Exchange Council, 39 states apply the Dillon Rule to some capacity. Thirty-one apply it to all localities, while eight use the rule for only certain municipalities. The Virginia Supreme Court adopted the Dillon Rule in 1896.

James Ewell Brown (J. E. B.) Stuart was commander of the Cavalry Corps of Lee’s army during the Civil War. Photo by Susan Shibut, Capital News Service

Because Virginia law states that localities cannot remove war monuments after they have been established, the Dillon Rule has prevented localities such as Richmond and Charlottesville from passing measures to remove their Confederate monuments.

When the General Assembly resumes session in January, a Democratic majority would make it easier for legislators to make a new law stating that local governments have the power to remove Confederate monuments, or a law that bans them outright. John Aughenbaugh, assistant professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University, said a new law is a way he could see localities gain the power to make their own decisions about the monuments.

“I don’t think many members of the General Assembly want to get blamed for upsetting those who still like the monuments,” Aughenbaugh said. “But they’ll be willing to go ahead and give the local governments the authority to make that decision on their own.”

Jim Nolan, press secretary for Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, said that increasing local authority has been a legislative priority for the mayor and will remain one heading into the 2020 General Assembly session. He said the mayor believes the General Assembly should grant authority to allow localities to determine the future of Confederate monuments. 

“Cities should have the right to choose if they want to contextualize or permanently remove monuments,” Nolan said.

In recent years, the Richmond City Council voted against two resolutions brought by Councilman Michael Jones requesting that state lawmakers give the city authority on what to do with the monuments. The resolutions would have put pressure on lawmakers to give the city authority. However, the General Assembly is not the only avenue for localities to gain the power to remove their monuments. Aughenbaugh said he predicts a locality will sue for the right to remove their monuments and the Virginia Supreme Court will be the deciding body. 

Jefferson Davis’ is the only monument that the Monument Avenue Commission recommended be torn down completely. Davis was the president of the Confederacy, and his monument is the most explicit in its veneration of the “Lost Cause,” the idea that the Confederate cause was just, heroic and ethical. Photo by Susan Shibut, Capital News Service.

One city has already brought such a suit. Earlier this year, Norfolk filed a lawsuit against the Commonwealth of Virginia, arguing that requiring the city to keep a Confederate monument was contrary to their freedom of speech. The suit has not been decided yet.

More than 1,800 Confederate symbols stand in 22 states as of February, according to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Virginia, with 262 Confederate symbols, has more than any other state and has removed 17 of its symbols since the racially-charged Charleston, South Carolina, church shooting in which nine African-Americans were murdered, the organization said.

For decades, Richmond has sought to offset Confederate symbols. In 1996, a sixth statue was added to Monument Avenue depicting Arthur Ashe, an African American tennis champion from Richmond. Earlier this year the Richmond City Council voted to rename the Boulevard to Arthur Ashe Boulevard. J.E.B. Stuart Elementary School was renamed Barack Obama Elementary after a 6-1 vote by the Richmond Public School Board in 2018. In December, Richmond’s Virginia Museum of Fine Arts unveiled, in front of a welcoming crowd, Kehinde Wiley’s statue “Rumors of War,” which depicts a black man in classic equestrian portraiture — a response to the monuments on Monument Avenue.

Virginia has been center stage in the national debate regarding the potential removal of Confederate monuments. In August 2017, the nation was rocked with news of violent clashes in Charlottesville. A “Unite the Right” rally and counter-demonstration were the climax of a months-long battle over the fate of a Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee statue that the Charlottesville City Council voted to remove. At the protest, James Alex Fields Jr., a white supremacist who traveled from Ohio to the event, drove his car into a crowd, killing counter-protester Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others. The night before the protest, participants gathered in the park with tiki torches and chanted slogans including the Nazi-associated phrase “blood and soil.”

After the Charleston, South Carolina, church shooting, Stoney created the Monument Avenue Commission in 2017 in hopes of creating new ways to remember Richmond’s history while addressing the past memorialized on Monument Avenue. Its first meeting took place days before Heyer died counter-protesting in Charlottesville.

“Richmond has a long, complex and conflicted history, and the Confederate statues on Monument Avenue represents a shameful part of our past,” Stoney said in the commission’s 117-page report. “The majority of the public acknowledges Monument Avenue cannot and should not remain exactly as it is. Change is needed and desired.” 

J. Hunter Dabney walks past the Robert E. Lee Monument. Robert E. Lee was a Confederate general. His monument was unveiled in 1890 and was the the first of the monuments to go up. Photo by Susan Shibut, Capital News Service.

After 11 months of public deliberation, the commission suggested solutions, which included:

  •  Moving the monuments to a museum and creating a permanent exhibit, including a deeper historical look into the history of the monuments by creating a mobile app and a film that ensures historical accuracy.
  • Adding permanent signage that reflects the historic, biographical, artistic, and changing meaning over time for each monument.
  • Erecting a monument that pays homage to the resilience of the formerly enslaved.
  • Having local artists create contemporary pieces that bring new meaning to Monument Avenue.
  • Removing the Jefferson Davis statue.

The city cannot implement these suggestions, however, if state law overrides local laws. 

House Bill 2377 was introduced by former Del. David Toscano, D-Charlottesville, in the 2019 General Assembly session. It would have given localities the power to remove or add context to their monuments, but it did not pass the then-Republican majority House.

For those who oppose the monuments, hope is on the rise. Democrats hold both chambers of the General Assembly as well as the governorship after the Nov. 5 elections — a power that has not been seen in over 20 years. Several of the newly elected legislators have spoken out against the monuments, including Democratic Sen.-elect Ghazala Hashmi, Democratic Del.-elect Sally Husdon, and Del. Jay Jones, D-Norfolk. Hudson plans to introduce legislation very similar to Toscano’s bill — Jones said he will co-sponsor the legislation.

In November, Jones tweeted: “The ‘monuments’ are nothing more than vestigial symbols of oppression and hate that need to come down – ESPECIALLY if it is the locality’s choice. We’re moving VA into the 21st century rather than ‘honoring’ the failures of the 19th.”

In 1895 the city purchased a lot at the intersection of Broad Street, Adams Street, and Brook Road for the J.E.B. Stuart monument. The location, at the terminus of Brook Turnpike, was where Stuart was shot and killed. That site became home to a statue of African-American businesswoman Maggie L. Walker in 2017. Photo by Susan Shibut, Capital News Service

This was not the first time Jones touched on this subject. During Black History month in February, following Gov. Ralph Northam’s blackface scandal, Jones stood in front of the House of Delegates and made a personal speech. 

Jones talked about “two Virginias,” a white one and a black one, and how they have existed “in parallel along the same arc of history, frequently intersecting, but never running together as one. Two different experiences, born from the same beginning four hundred years ago and still never merged into one shared story.” 

According to Jones, “glorification of the Confederacy via monuments and flags in public spaces,” are examples of how white Virginians “consciously or unconsciously attempted to demonstrate its power over black Virginians.”

In describing the racially-charged differences between Virginians, Jones said, “It seems that we have not come far enough to understand the hurt and pain and the effect on those who grew up in the shadow of separate but not equal. Thirty years on, throughout the duration of my life, we are still struggling mightily with race in our state.”

If localities are given the authority to legislate the fate of their monuments, Nolan said Stoney and his administration will ask the city’s History and Culture Commission to make recommendations and commit to following a process in accordance to solutions provided by the Monument Avenue Commission.

Written by McKenzie Lambert and Susan Shibut, Capital News Service. Top Photo: Monument Avenue has five Confederate monuments and one statue of Richmond-native tennis champion Arthur Ashe on its median. Photo by Susan Shibut, Capital News Service.

The Valentine’s Latest Exhibition Reimagines Richmond’s Most Notorious Thoroughfare

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The Valentine’s exhibit, Monument Avenue: General Demotion/General Devotion, isn’t meant to stir up controversy, said Bill Martin, museum director. But the exhibit, which premiered last Thursday (yes, on Valentine’s Day), is meant to provoke meaningful conversation about the future of Monument Avenue — a future that has been the topic of much public scrutiny and debate in recent years.

The exhibit showcases finalists in a national design competition held by the museum, in partnership with VCU’s mObstudiO and the Storefront for Community Design. The competition invited artists from across the globe to submit their reimaginings of Monument Avenue. Martin said approximately 100 artists submitted proposals. The proposals were submitted as drawings.

“Some of them are absolute fantasies, and others are things that will provide some food for thought for changes,” said Martin. “There may be some ideas that go beyond the traditional sign to help interpret the street.”

“This is an idea competition,” said Martin. “If we could release our brains and think about how we can use this street in productive ways to talk about some of the tough issues of the community, that’s what this is about… There are not a lot of parameters by intent, to give people space to rethink [Monument Avenue].”

In addition to the juried awards, a people’s choice award will be given. Every guest who views the exhibit will be given the chance to vote for their favorite design.

Martin said this exhibit is the “logical next step” following the museum’s past exhibit, Monumental: Richmond’s Monuments (1607-2018). That exhibit, which ran from July 2018 through January 2019, explored the monuments of Richmond, from Monument Avenue and beyond, and examined their historical context.

The design competition asked artists to not only consider the Monument Avenue of the city, but all five and a half miles, extending into Henrico County.

“I was particularly an advocate of making sure [the competition] was all of the street, because there’s this five-mile opportunity of Monument Avenue that has not been the focus of our conversations and ideas,” said Martin.

Martin said that VCU mObstudiO and the Storefront for Community Design were integral in executing the project, and that VCU students have played a large role in getting the exhibit up and running.

“VCU students have been working in a variety of ways. They’ve been helping coordinate the actual competition process. There’s a whole group working on the graphic approach to the exhibition, designing logos and social media… developing the look for the exhibition,” said Martin. “They have also been coordinating with public schools, and there will be a kids version of this that will open at the Branch Museum.” That exhibit, Monumental Youth, is open now and can be seen at the Branch Museum, located at 2501 Monument Ave, until April 19.

Martin says he feels that opening the competition up to artists internationally will help bring in a broader scope of creative ideas.

“So often when you live in a place, you live with objects and a history,” said Martin. “Sometimes it’s really exciting and essential to have an outside perspective, because we’ve become so comfortable with the way we talk about a particular part of town. [The competition] really invites that outside perspective that will hopefully inspire some new ideas about what we can do as a community to make sense of what is this really interesting and challenging street.”

Martin made it clear that while he hopes the exhibit will spark meaningful dialogue and inspire people to question what the monuments represent, it is not intended to do the physical work of change.

“This is the perfect role for a museum, to encourage a broad range of ideas and to challenge people to think differently about the history of this city and about themselves,” said Martin. “This is an opportunity to discuss some of the broader, deeper issues that the community faces… but also step back and maybe not take ourselves as seriously occasionally.”

Top Photo via Facebook. Other photos via VCU Capital News Service

RVA Global: Beirut’s Reckoning With Civil War Has Lessons For Richmond

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Like Richmond, Lebanon’s capital city Beirut is still grappling with the legacy of civil war. Unlike those in Richmond, though, many of Beirut’s current residents lived through the most recent civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990. The political structure that exacerbated the tensions of the war still exists. Lebanon’s 18 official sect affiliations organize political representation, access to government services, and much of social life, largely as they did before the war.

The Beit Beirut house

Debates about reconciliation and commemoration co-exist with immediate concerns about ongoing rebuilding and preservation efforts, contemporary politics, and even, for some families, with lingering questions about the disappearance of loved ones. As a result, the attempt to identify some sort of collective memory is fraught.

The International Center for Transitional Justice notes that, “The civil war is not documented in school history books, and young people are often actively discouraged from discussing it in school.” I heard this concern echoed by friends and fellow educators in Beirut and ascribed to the difficulty of politicians’ and community leaders’ coming to narrative consensus about the war.

Without a shared academic curriculum or national narrative commemorating the war, Beirut’s artists and designers play a key role in visualizing memory and linking their history with the present. My time in Lebanon last month coincided with the seventh annual Beirut Design Week.

The program, which ran from June 22 through 29, showcased the work of local artists, designers, writers, and activists. Begun in 2012, Beirut Design Week (BDW) now offers more than 150 exhibits, lectures, temporary public art pop ups and performances, and interactive community events, drawing at least 25,000 visitors per year, according to the organizers’ calculations.

The theme of this year’s BDW was “Design and the City.” It called for contributors and audience members alike to, “Consider design’s transformative role in conceiving of the urban space in such ways that express our needs, desires and dreams as inhabitants of the city.”

Fleeting Memories exhibit

While BDW exhibits explored a range of topics, the war’s legacy echoed throughout artists’ work and even through the exhibition sites themselves. The exhibits I attended cautioned against both remaining beholden to and ignoring history. Instead, they looked for ways that design and public art could mediate between the past and present.

Some pieces explicitly took up the impact of war reconstruction efforts. The BDW exhibit “Fading Memory” was created by the organization Architects for Change and was installed in Zico House, a formerly private home built in 1935 in the Sanayeh District. Architects for Change called Zico House a model of “adaptive reuse.”

In their introduction to the exhibit, they argued that Beirut has been negatively impacted by “the boom of foreign gentrification” in which developers from outside Beirut rebuild without considering the city’s culture and history. The Beirut Souks, for example, once the site of local trade in fabrics, spices, and other goods, now more closely resemble Short Pump. The renovation was spearheaded by a private real estate company called Solidere, which came under fire for its connections to the Hariri family (Rafik Hariri was a former prime minister of Lebanon who was assassinated in 2005; his son Saad currently holds the same position) and its willful erasure of civil war history in Beirut’s downtown.

Timeless Tiles exhibit

To challenge that kind of development, Architects for Change turned Zico House into a space visibly flooded by memory. Artists created an imagined former resident of the house, a young boy whose recollections of home—“the rubber tree roots that broke through our tiles and became part of our house,” for example—were written on walls and hung from trees.

As visitors wound their way up Zico’s steep stairwell, they were invited to describe their own feelings about Beirut’s past, present, and future in a single word on tiles which were then added to a rooftop mosaic (one respondent’s three answers: “Raw, tragic, fragile”). Once on the rooftop, signs marked the former locations of buildings that were since demolished by war or by rebuilding, as cranes and constructions workers labored across the street.

Before the war, Beit Beirut, another BDW site, functioned as the Barakat House does now. It was designed by Lebanese architect Youssef Afandi Aftimos in 1924. Because of the building’s position on the dividing line between East and West Beirut, it became a sniper post and saw heavy fighting.

The Beit Beirut house as it stands now

Today, Beit Beirut’s façade is pockmarked with bullet holes and worn down by fire. The casual observer might assume that she’s looking at a condemned building. Inside, though, new metal supports bolster the structure, the paint is fresh, and renovators have installed a modern auditorium and office spaces.

On the ground floor of Beit Beirut, a permanent exhibit describes the former photography business, Photo Mario, that was located at this address before the war. Curator Mona El Hallak describes the project as essential to Beit Beirut’s efforts as a “Museum of Memory.” Negatives and images uncovered from the debris after the war hang from the walls. Additional boxes of photos encourage viewers to pick one and attempt to locate the person in the image, drawing the audience into the work of reconciliation.

Project Mario at Beit Beirut

In her work on Beit Beirut, it’s clear that El Hallak sees memory as not only the attempt to clarify and understand the past, but as a way to navigate Beirut as it is now, a city informed by a long history of art, culture, business, and, yes, violence. The BDW-specific exhibit at Beit Beirut this summer continued that effort. Inside a building marked by what El Hallak calls “war architecture,” urban design researchers mapped 2018 Beirut based on the perception of migrant delivery drivers, the diminishing presence of the Beirut River, and interactive surveys that, in Jimmy Elias’s “Multiple City” project, uses feedback from the audience to “translat[e] subjective emotions and experiences into narratives that contribute to a better comprehension of cities and one’s own life within the city.”  

Richmond and Beirut are nowhere close to identical cities, and what works for Beirut as it continues working toward a future that engages a legacy of violence and deep divide will not necessarily be true for Richmond. But with the Monument Avenue Commission Report’s recent emphasis on partnering with the local arts community to envision new possibilities for commemoration in Richmond, Beirut Design Week is a useful reminder that the work of navigating the past and envisioning the future should be creative, intentional, collaborative, a bit messy, and always open to the public.

All photos by Katie Logan 

*This article was made possible in part by support from the VCU Global Education Office.

So Long, Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States

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After a long, heated debate, change became the chosen path for Richmond today. According to the Monument Avenue Commission, Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney officially recommended the removal of the Jefferson Davis Monument today from Monument Avenue.

“Of all the statues, this one is most unabashedly Lost Cause [sic] in its design and sentiment,” the commissioners wrote in the report.

The board includes Christy Coleman, CEO of the American Civil War Museum, and Sarah Driggs, author of “Richmond’s Monument Avenue,” among others who look to direct the River City away from the ‘lost cause’ narrative many of these monuments represent. And with these monuments having origins in the Confederate ‘lost cause’ mythology and Unite The Right 2.0 coming up in August, the commission came as a much needed response for these controversial monuments.

After nearly one year of intensive study by the ten person commission, the group produced a 117  page report considering the future of Richmond’s Confederate statues, opening the floor to options including removal or relocation of the Confederate statues into a museum, or somewhere with proper context.

“In addition to taking on the responsibility of explaining the monuments that currently exist, I have also asked the commission to look into and solicit public opinion on changing the face of Monument Avenue by adding new monuments that would reflect a broader, more inclusive story of our city,” said Stoney in a statement one year ago. “That is our goal.”

The yearlong review examining the statues originally created to “determine how best to reconcile a particular landscape viewed as both sacred and profane,” is now figuring that for many of the statues, removal is the best option. Riding off the recent change to the Barack Obama Elementary school last month, this is the first of many necessary reforms to a city that has never truly healed.

The report also addresses the monuments of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart and Stonewall Jackson, President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis and Confederate commander Matthew Fontaine Maury with short term changes that will add context to the statues, such as proper signage. They will also consider the opening or expansion into a museum exhibit, where the monuments may be put into proper context that reflects the newly inclusive historical significance the city wants to promote.

The commission’s site currently offers an open forum for public discussion, but is also developing a mobile app and new film and video that looks to rewire the proper narrative about Monument Avenue that is “consistent and historically accurate.”