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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.”

Opinion: Some History Makers Who Should Also Join Monument Avenue

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The Virginia Senate and House of Delegates spent the day before the start of Black History Month killing bill proposals that would allow local governments to move Confederate statues and rename Confederate-branded highways. They didn’t do it without their constituents’ support either.

Exit polls from last November’s elections show that 60 percent of Virginia voters feel Confederate statues and monuments should be left in place despite the fact 46 percent of those believed “displaying the monuments is offensive to African-Americans.” Such idiosyncratic attitudes towards history and race should come as no surprise in a state that from 1984 to 2000 celebrated Lee-Jackson-King Day, a holiday that simultaneously glorified Confederate icons and a Civil Rights hero.

Once again, this unwillingness to separate ourselves from our state’s Confederate past has placed us at odds with the necessity of forging a more inclusive and tolerant future.

As it exists today, Monument Avenue is not unlike a Revolutionary War memorial displaying only tributes to British generals; the status quo is untenable. This beloved boulevard presents us with an opportunity to rebrand our state following the terror in Charlottesville. We must take this chance and transform this space into a historic promenade which showcases the full spectrum of our complex past. We must expand the statues on Monument Avenue beyond the current five Confederates and local civil rights hero, Arthur Ashe, to include five more statues that would honor lynching victims, abolitionists, Union soldiers, the leaders of slave rebellions, and our hope for a better future.

 In a state with so rich a history as ours, one need not dig too deep to find a wealth of stories that would provide the next generation with a broader, more inclusive picture of our state’s slave-owning past, its continued effects on modern society, and the power of individuals to overcome racism.


At the time of his lynching, Raymond Byrd was a 31-year-old husband and father of three, a veteran of World War I, and a gainfully employed farmhand in Wythe County. After an affair with his employer’s adult daughter led to the birth of an interracial child, Byrd was arrested on trumped-up charges of rape filed by the Commonwealth Attorney in the summer of 1926. While in police custody, Byrd was kidnapped from the Wytheville jail by a mob of masked men, shot, beaten, and dragged several miles before being hung from a tree branch.

Byrd’s fate was all too common in the South; 86 men were lynched between 1888 and 1926 in Virginia alone. After just 10 minutes of deliberation, the jury released the only suspect arrested for Byrd’s murder—a tragically typical outcome during this era in which only 0.8 percent of lynchings resulted in a conviction between 1900 and 1933. The national outrage prompted Virginia to pass the country’s first anti-lynching legislation in 1928 after repeated attempts at a federal law were blocked in Congress by the filibusters of Southern Democrats. To this day, there exists no federal law against lynching.

The Statues We Need:

Once called “the most radical white male who grew up in the antebellum South,” by history professor John d’Entremont of Randolph Macon, Moncure D. Conway spent his life as the black sheep of his patrician, slave-holding family. The grandson of a signatory of the Declaration of Independence and the nephew of a Supreme Court justice, Conway attended Harvard Divinity School and became a Unitarian minister in Washington, D.C. in 1854 where he served for two years until his removal for preaching his abolitionist beliefs.

After learning of the destruction of Fredericksburg in 1862, Conway returned to his family home on the Rappahannock to track down their slaves and personally led 30 of them to freedom in Ohio where he helped them establish a new settlement that came to be known as Conway’s Colony. As an abolitionist and radical feminist, Conway was far ahead of his time, even criticizing Abraham Lincoln for freeing the slaves without addressing the issue of equal rights; angered by the president’s lack of forethought, Conway wrote, “What will we do in 1962?”—correctly divining the Civil Rights Movement a century later.

At the age of 17, Maria Lewis fled the Virginia plantation where she’d spent her entire life as a slave to escape to freedom. Rather than run, she disguised herself as a man, chose the name George Harris, and joined a whites-only unit, the 8th New York Calvary. At first enlisting was just a way to escape north, however, Lewis quickly fell in love with the life of a soldier, charging into battle on horseback with rifle and sword in hand. Lewis was not alone in fighting for her people’s freedom in disguise. She was one of roughly 750 women that waged war on the front lines in the same manner.”

After her unit took 500 men prisoner and captured 17 flags in one battle, this teenage black girl and former slave was one of the few “white men” chosen to present their unit’s winnings to Lincoln’s Secretary of War. Lewis left the army after two years of service to spend the rest of her life not as George Harris but rather in a similarly unheard of role at that time in America, that of a free black woman.

“Here, before God, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery!” bellowed John Brown after the murder of Presbyterian minister and abolitionist, Elijah Lovejoy, at the hands of a pro-slavery mob in 1837.  The man who had been a simple shepherd, tanner, and father of 15 was transformed into the loudest advocate of armed insurrection as the only path by which to overthrow slavery in the United States. Frustrated by the pacificism of other abolitionists, Brown became a national figure during the Bleeding Kansas crisis of 1856 when he led volunteers into battle against pro-slavery militias to determine the territory’s future as either a free- or slave-state.

Three years later, Brown would lead a party of 22 to raid the military arsenal in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia in hopes of initiating an armed slave revolt. After the Marines swiftly put an end to the raid, Brown was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. On the day of his execution, he mused, “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land will never be purged away but with Blood. I had vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done.”  Brown’s wrong-headed raid escalated tensions on both sides, triggering southern talk of secession to preserve slavery as well as northern praise of him as a martyr for freedom.

Mildred Loving, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were sentenced to a year in prison by the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1959 after they married. Their crime was miscegenation, the act of marrying outside of each of their racial groups. After the Lovings were sentenced and forced to move to the District of Columbia, Mildred wrote to then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy for help. He referred her case to the ACLU, and the landmark civil rights case of Loving v. Virginia began on its path to the Supreme Court.

In a unanimous 1967 decision which invalidated all race-based restrictions on marriage, the Supreme Court determined such prohibitions were unconstitutional—a finding that would undergird full marriage equality 48 years later. The Lovings spent the rest of their lives happily married, unwittingly serving as a testament to the power of love to conquer hatred.  The final statue added to Monument Avenue must be of Mildred and Richard Loving—a statue to show us justice is inevitable and that love defies all prejudice.

In those same exit polls from last November, only 30 percent of Virginia voters felt Confederate monuments defended slavery. Virginians are not alone in our misremembering of history; a 2017 survey found that only eight percent of high school seniors identified slavery as the cause of the Civil War. The removal of our Confederate statues is not only unpopular, but indeed morally wrong. The correct way to deal with the past is not to tear it down and hide it away. We must look our messy, ugly past straight in the face and examine the full spectrum of roles Virginians played in our history—from victims to perpetrators to those who give us hope for a brighter tomorrow.

If our goal as a society is racial reconciliation, then our unique burden as Richmonders must be to educate ourselves and others to embrace a complete and representative history of slavery and the Civil War.

Neo-Confederates Apparently Preparing for a Second Rally in Richmond

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*This story has been updated.

Despite attracting only a few supporters and finding themselves stranded and seeking donations to get home, the trio behind the Lee Monument rally are planning a comeback. Organizers of the failed rally last weekend Tara Brandau, Tom Crompton, and Judy Crompton have posted a Facebook event called “Protect The General Robert E. Lee Monument – Round 2”, originally planned for December 2nd. Since our first report, they’ve changed the date to December 9th.

From CSA II Facebook Event Page

The event will conflict with the Richmond Christmas Parade, which takes place starting at 10:15 AM parallel to Monument Avenue on Broad Street. As of press time, the rally has 16 rsvps; it reached 70 for the previous event, but only 3-4 people joined the organizers. They were dwarfed by an estimated 400 counter-protesters, consisting of local advocates, church groups, the Richmond Peace Education Center, and an out-of-state Black Lives Matter chapter from New York.

Brandau and the Cromptons claim again to have been invited by a Virginia chapter of the CSA II organization the Cromptons founded, but we’ve been unable to verify that the chapter exists outside of a small Facebook group administered by the Cromptons.

The CSA II has posted a photo with a caption suggesting a heavily-armed presence; “Ready for round two and doing it our way this time, Guns Up”. In response, local residents have harsh words for the trio on the event page, reproduced below.

*Cover photo from Facebook event post by the CSA II

As of 5:30 pm the organizers of this supposed rally have locked their event page, banned certain people including RVA Mag’s journalists, and removed any negative comments from residents living in Richmond.