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Landrieu Urges Reflection On Monuments In Meeting With Stoney

Madelyne Ashworth | March 22, 2019

Topics: Confederate monuments, Jefferson Davis Monument, Mayor Levar Stoney, Mitch Landrieu, New Orleans, racial reconciliation, robert e lee, Virginia Museum Of History & Culture

In his meeting with Mayor Levar Stoney this week, former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu challenged Richmonders to consider the continued impact of Confederate monuments on our city’s image and reputation.

It was a meeting of the Mayoral minds on Tuesday, as Richmond’s Mayor Levar Stoney and New Orleans’ former mayor Mitch Landrieu engaged in thoughtful discussion at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture.

About 100 people listened as Mayor Stoney recounted Richmond’s struggle with Confederate iconography and race relations in Richmond, while Landrieu recalled his experience presiding over the removal of his city’s Confederate monuments.

“We created things with regard to race, and we can’t fix things without regard to race,” Landrieu said. “Our public spaces speak to who you are. It’s intended to say something, especially monuments and statues.”

At the crux of this discussion, Landrieu asked of Richmond: What do we want to be known for?

Overhead view of New Orleans’ Battle Of Liberty Place Monument in 2006. The monument was erected in 1891 to commemorate an 1874 riot against New Orleans’ Reconstruction-era government by the White League, a white supremacist group. It was taken down by Landrieu’s administration in 2017. Photo by Infrogmation, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia

In 2015, Landrieu called for the removal from prominent public display of four monuments in New Orleans, three of Confederate generals and one memorializing a violent coup of the state government by the Crescent City White League. All the monuments in question were removed by May 2017, although not without two years of legal battles, public criticism, and even threats against Landrieu’s life. His opponents criticized him for a lack of transparency during the process.

In a discussion moderated by Julian Hayter, an associate professor of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond and member of Stoney’s Monument Avenue Commission, Stoney and Landrieu discussed racism in the South, and how to reconcile its history with its people.

“We can’t ignore the fact that we’ve had an ugly history,” Stoney said.

Last year, Stoney’s Monument Avenue Commission recommended removing the Jefferson Davis monument, while adding context to the other four Confederate statues.

Jefferson Davis monument on Monument Avenue. Public Domain, via Wikimedia

Landrieu’s charismatic, animated oration offered blunt, third-party observations about Richmond’s race relations and Confederate iconography. Ultimately, he posited Richmond must find a solution that is right for Richmond, regardless of any other city’s actions.

“There is a difference between remembrance and reverence,” Landrieu said. “Remembrance is what you always want to do, so you don’t let it happen again. Reverence is honoring something, so you might be able to do it again.”

Stoney stated that if it were in his legal power to remove them, the statues would be gone. He also said that while removing the statues were important to many Richmonders, his real concern was providing reparations to deprived communities negatively affected by past racial injustices.

In this context, reparations are not about putting cash directly in the hands of disenfranchised people; they are about funding schools that never get funded, putting money in parks and community spaces, and reforming previously exclusive places into safe, inclusive space. They are about allowing a city’s architecture, aesthetic, art, and monuments to reflect the citizens it houses.

“Does that man standing on top of that thing send a message that you are welcome here, and that we want you to be here?” Landrieu said. “I was the mayor of a majority African American city, and I was the mayor of a city that has a monument that doesn’t represent our city. We decided in our specific circumstance, it was the best thing to do. What you cannot do is forget who put it up and why they put it up.”

Landrieu urged Richmonders to consider that a single plaque is not contextualization. To provide an adequate frame of reference would require the statue of a “lynched man” to reside next to Jackson and Lee.

Hayter, Stoney, and Landrieu. Photo by John Donegan

It may be prudent to point out that by erecting those statues, we are actually disobeying the wishes of a dead man, one who is at the epicenter of this entire debate: Robert E. Lee.

“I think it wiser,” the retired Lee once wrote of a proposed Gettysburg memorial in 1869, “not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”

After the Civil War, Lee swore allegiance to the Union, publicly denounced any sentiment toward Southern separatism, affirmed the need to move on, and believed that by keeping those images alive, so would the sentiments of division live on and thrive.

Mayor Landrieu asserted similar sentiments in asking us to question that reverence associated with Confederate iconography. We have an entire avenue on which we all but worship the leaders of a failed nation, then act as if this is a presentation of historical events rather than a deep respect and longing for that failed nation.

“People are watching y’all,” Landrieu said. “I want to ask, do y’all want to be known for that?”

America has a history of building grandiose, reverent monuments to what Lee described as “civil strife,” and compared to those left by other countries throughout the 20th century after their own national conflicts, it calls us to examine how Americans display memorials to bloodshed.

The American cemetery at Normandy. Photo by Leon Petrosyan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia

Our memorial to the lives lost in the 9/11 attacks has turned into a multibillion dollar shopping mall, the Westfield World Trade Center. The American cemetery in Normandy, France, honoring those soldiers lost to WWII, boasts a $30 million welcome center, a chapel, and a 22-foot statue. Compared to the somber, understated French, German, and Canadian cemeteries in the same area, America’s message is clear: We are dominant, we are proud, we are strong, we are to be seen.

And while direct, this isn’t entirely inappropriate. Our culture differs from European countries in that we are opportunistic, and have a free-market capitalist economy. We honor our tragedies, but we simultaneously find a way to make money from them. We are clever, competitive, and fierce. Albeit occasionally sporting a tone-deaf quality, it is true to our nature. For better or worse, it is what we are known for. And, ultimately, even the aforementioned monuments honor soldiers and innocent lives lost to tragedy and terror, rather than the lost cause for continued human oppression that the figures on Monument Avenue commemorate.

And so, Mayor Landrieu’s challenge to Richmond resonates. In the wake of his visit, we must ask ourselves the same question he asked of us: What do you want to be known for? And how will you display it?

Top photo by John Donegan

New Documentary About Racial Reconciliation Premiering This Sunday at The Byrd Theater

David Streever | April 2, 2018

Topics: arrabon, david bailey, east end fellowship, racial reconciliation, urban doxology

A new documentary about local work towards racial reconciliation premieres this Sunday at The Byrd Theater in Carytown. Titled 11 AM: Hope for America’s Most Segregated Hour in homage to Martin Luther King, Jr., who said church was “the most segregated hour in America”, the film focuses on Urban Doxology, a music ministry of the local nonprofit organization Arrabon.

A doxology is a liturgical praise to God, which is what the group offers: Contemporary hymns dealing with the challenges of racial reconciliation in this city and beyond. Arrabon Executive Director visited RVA Mag to talk about the group and the unique collaborative songwriting process that they derive their music from.

David Bailey

“It’s an eight week internship, with a diverse group,” he said, during which participants learn about “white supremacy, race, identity, class, and cultural issues… instead of a paper, they write a song about what they’ve learned.”

The internship is a partnership between East End Fellowship and Bailey’s Arrabon, which he founded in 2008 after moving back to Church Hill. “I saw two church hills, and wanted to bring them together,” he said about the motivation that led him to create his nonprofit. The group works with faith communities to share resources and a study series for churches seeking to engage in racial reconciliation.

Bailey been working towards racial reconciliation for the last 15 years, “especially in evangelical communities,” he said. Part of that work was a musical tour with Urban Doxology, visiting  historically black colleges and universities, which is where he first met filmmaker Sebastian Rogers of Peripheral Vision PDX who had a proposal to film their work. “What we are doing is so unique, and he’s just such a gifted filmmaker, I knew it was time to do it,” Bailey said about the collaboration.

The film features local interviews and scenes of racial reconciliation work, along with Urban Doxology performances, including clips of them singing at a prayer vigil in Charlottesville the night before violent “alt-right” protesters would take to the streets during the supremacist Unite the Right rally last August. The trailer was released earlier this year on Jan 31.

Urban Doxology members

Bailey said his work is rooted in churches because of historic injustices in the faith. “There’s a one hundred year problem with race in America,” he added. “Christians should be the answer, but more often not we’ve been the problem.”

He pointed to the origins of Christianity as a faith that sprung up in the shadows of oppression. “Jesus came into form as an oppressed person. He was a refugee, an immigrant. When we forget that narrative, we lose track of what the religion is all about.”

Although he wants to talk about and address wrong-doing both historical and contemporary, Bailey stressed that demonizing people is not part of the agenda. “This isn’t a documentary blaming folks, but it’s an invitation, with truth and hope to come together and understand racism.”

Bailey at a pastor press conference against white supremacy

He’s optimistic about reconciliation, contrarily pointing to some current unrest as proof that society is moving in the right direction. “Diversity guarantees conflict,” he said. “Things are changing. People who are used to feeling power are starting to experience equality, and it feels like oppression to them. We can’t leave them behind, we have to bring them up with us.”

He described honest engagement as the key to solving that unrest. At the end of the screening he’ll provide some of that dialogue with a question and answer session, which he hopes will serve as a “starting point” for people to begin reconciliation work.

Bailey said his goal for the film is to “serve as a catalyst.” He even wants people to learn from the “alt-right” marchers in Charlottesville, he added, saying, “The people in Charlottesville were bold although wrong. Can we be bold and right?”

The film begins at 2 PM. Tickets can be purchased in advance for $5.

Photos courtesy Arrabon and Urban Doxology.

Richmond Woman At the Heart Of National Efforts Towards Racial Reconciliation

David Streever | March 12, 2018

Topics: barbara holley, Bishop Michael Curry, christopher graham, elizabeth oleary, melanie mullen, racial reconciliation, St Paul's Episcopal Church

Just as Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy, St Paul’s Episcopal Church was its cathedral. It was the church where Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis worshipped, and it was the church that hosted the Most Rev. Michael B. Curry, the first black leader of the Episcopal Church, and nearly 500 people for a series of talks and presentations outlining the history of St Paul’s and the national Episcopal Church in slavery, segregation, and racism.

The event, Bending Toward Truth: A Forum on Race and Religion in Richmond, kicked off on Saturday night and ran through Sunday worship, but it really began two years ago, on a day that the Rev. Melanie Mullen remembers with a laugh full of wonderment. “I don’t know what got into me, but I just wrote a letter to Bishop Curry,” she said, describing a letter she sent detailing the struggle St Paul’s was having with its history.

The church had been quietly grappling with its legacy for years, but it had begun a public dialogue after the mass killing at a historically black church in Charleston by a man obsessed with symbols of the Confederacy. Members of the congregation, where 1 in 10 members are black and many white members can trace their lineage back to the Civil War, started looking around at their own Confederate iconography and feeling uncomfortable.

“Wallace [the former head priest] was giving these sermons about it, and I was kind of the resident black person in the clergy,” Mullen said. She reached out to Curry, the recently elected presiding Bishop because he was talking about something he called the Jesus Movement, a shift for the church to focus on the biblical narratives where Jesus stands for justice and equality. In his three year tenure, Curry has become an outspoken voice on issues ranging from tribal rights for the First Nations people to transgender rights.

For St Paul’s, that letter later led to this event; for Mullen, it led to her new position as the Director of Reconciliation, Justice & Creation Care for the Episcopal Church, based in Washington D.C. “The Jesus Movement has to include racial reconciliation at its core,” she said, along with other social justice issues like the rights of women and LGBTQ individuals.

Part of her job is to share the tools and resources St Paul’s created around racial justice, which she said came out of the congregation. “The octogenarians in this church did the research work,” she said. “We had to teach some of them how to use the computer, how to research online, but they did this all as an incredible act of faith.”

Mullen said it really hit for the people who had long, storied histories.

“That’s what made it successful. They were looking into the histories behind their own names and were horrified by what they learned about the lives of slaves and how they had their names taken away from them,” she said.

Graham’s Opening Panel

The forum opened earlier Saturday night with an account of St Paul’s history by Christopher Graham and Elizabeth O’Leary, members of its History and Reconciliation Initiative. Taking turns, the two historians detailed the role of St Paul’s and the Episcopal Church from pre-Civil War to the current millennium. Guest scholars Corey Walker, vice-president of The Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology, Professor Nicole Myers Turner of Virginia Commonwealth University, and Edward Ayers, Richmond University president emeritus, shared responses to the presentation.

Graham began by explaining that the pro-slavery views held by parishioners were rooted in white supremacy. “They defined the enslavement of humans not as an act of violence, but as benevolence, which they justified by their Christian faith,” he said.

This theme of individual responsibility was echoed throughout the evening’s panels, first by Ayers, who said that churchgoers reconciled faith and slavery by focusing on the ways they personally treated the people they kept enslaved. Ayers compared their outlook to our contemporary debate around the statues. “Does it matter what the personal motivations of Lee and Jackson were if the result of their actions was to establish a state on the perpetual bondage of human beings?”

Assoc. Rector Molly Bosscher

O’Leary and Graham continued the history lesson into the 20th century, noting that the church had often fought overt racism like that of the Ku Klux Klan and legal segregation, but had endorsed the Lost Cause mythology of a noble and beneficent Confederacy, supported the statue to Lee, and advocated for voluntary segregation.

Mary Munford was one major figure in the early 20th century Graham focused on. Although she founded the Virginia Inter-Racial League and served on the board of the National Urban League, she was seen as an impediment to progress by African American leaders, said Graham, who described her as paternalistic. He quoted Wiley Hall, secretary of the Richmond Urban League, who wrote that she seemed to be one of those “liberals willing to work for Negroes but not to work with Negroes.”

It was in the later decades of the 20th-century that St Paul’s finally began to disavow its identity as the Church of the Confederacy to begin “proclaiming Christ in the heart of the city,” a phrase that became the official motto sometime in the ‘90s.

Other speakers throughout the night included CEO Christy Coleman of the American Civil War Museum and other non-profit leaders, along with a panel moderated by the Rev. Ben Campbell, author of Richmond’s Unhealed History, consisting of clergy from Richmond and the counties of different denominations. Subjects ranged from historical to modern-day inequalities, and clergy panelists, in particular, explored the ways that individual responsibility has been used to evade collective work to address those inequalities.

Walker, Curry, VA Bishop Johnston

During a short intermission between panels, attendees ate sandwiches from brown bags and mingled in the parish hall with speakers, visiting clergy, and event organizers, including Barbara Holley, a founder of the History and Reconciliation Initiative.

“I came here in 2003,” she said, describing it as one of many churches she and her husband looked at, but the first that had a “truly welcoming congregation.”

She said that one sermon in particular by the previous rector, the Rev. Wallace Adams-Riley, who had asked, “Do we want to be known as the church of the Confederacy, or the church of reconciliation?”, had motivated the formation of the HRI. The church quietly removed Confederate flags in the 1970s under then rector Rt. Rev. John Shelby Spong, but in 2015, the vestry, or board, held a robust public process and then voted to remove remaining battle flag images that still embellished war memorial plaques and kneelers.

Holley, who is black, said they aren’t looking to remove their infamous stained glass windows of Davis and Lee, but are “changing how we speak about the windows in a way that reflects what they really are.”

She said attendance had exceeded her expectations and showed that they needed to continue their work. “The amount of time we have in one weekend, for all these people isn’t enough,” she said, noting the number of speakers and attendees. She’s already at work planning a fall symposium. She said the event today had done its part to “begin a conversation, but we have to do this again. We have to keep the momentum going.”

This story has been updated; the process by which St Paul’s removed images of the Confederacy in 2015 was clarified. A spelling typo in the title of Campbell’s book was corrected.

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