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Statue of Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart taken down in Richmond Gen. Robert E. Lee is the only Confederate icon still standing on a Richmond avenue forever changed
(about 5 hours later)
This is a developing story. It will be updated. RICHMOND — Beth Almore played the cello as J.E.B. Stuart fell.
RICHMOND — Workers have taken down the statue of Gen. J.E.B. Stuart on Monument Avenue, the fourth and final Confederate memorial located on city-owned property along the iconic thoroughfare. Sitting on a shady median along Monument Avenue Tuesday morning, Almore refused to look at the bronze Confederate statue as a crane hoisted it from the base where it had stood since 1907. She played Bach, and the haunting “Spiegel im Spiegel” by Arvo Pärt, and afterward wouldn’t even say the name of the man whose bronze likeness now lay on its side on a flatbed truck to be hauled away.
A crane arrived early Tuesday, and the traffic circle around the statue was blocked off. A crowd of several hundred looked on quietly as workers prepared to lift the equestrian statue. “That’s a person who deserves to be a footnote in history,” said Almore, 53, a public school music teacher in Richmond. A photo of her great-great grandmother, born into slavery in Mississippi, rested on her music stand. “What concerns me is that if it takes this much effort to get a statue removed, what is it going to take to get systemic racism dismantled in this country?”
They erupted in cheers, applause and chants of “Black Lives Matter” and “Hey, hey, goodbye” around 10:44 a.m., as the statue came off its base and was lowered to the ground. After a solid month of day and night protests, all four Confederate statues on city-owned property along Monument Avenue are gone. Only the grandest and oldest monument — to Gen. Robert E. Lee, which towers 60 feet over state-owned land — remains. A judge has so far blocked Gov. Ralph Northam (D) from removing it.
Only the titanic monument to Robert E. Lee remains standing on Monument Avenue, a Paris-like boulevard designed to highlight the Confederate memorials. It took 155 years, but the symbols of old Dixie may finally have been driven down. Anger about police killings of African Americans has fueled a national reckoning with racism and inequity. In the South, that’s led to a final attack on the icons of the Confederacy, with the battle flag banned by NASCAR and removed from the state flag in Mississippi.
Lee is on state property, and while Gov. Ralph Northam (D) has ordered it taken down, a judge has imposed an injunction against removal because of a lawsuit involving the deed that conveyed the statue site to the state. In Richmond, a group of well-heeled residents is fighting in court to save Lee, arguing in part that losing the statue will harm property values. “It was mystical, magical to walk down the street any time of year,” said Patrick McSweeney, 77, a lawyer who grew up around the corner from the monuments and now is representing the property owners.
The dismantling of the Stuart memorial caps a whirlwind month of change on Richmond’s most famous street, a grand promenade of homes that long emphasized a romanticized notion of the Confederacy but has become the focal point of protests against injustice toward African Americans. The popular effort to take them down, he said, is “worse than the Bastille.”
Demonstrators protesting police killings of unarmed black citizens toppled a statue of Confederate president Jefferson Davis last month after the removal of the Lee monument was delayed. But the voices that once defined the former capital of the Confederacy have become hard to find in the past month. When Mayor Levar Stoney (D) had a statue of Stonewall Jackson removed last week, one white man carrying a flag that said “respect and protect” rushed the base of the monument, openly crying and begging for the work to stop. He was hustled away by sheriff’s deputies.
Protesters also attempted to pull down the Stuart statue, but were prevented by police. No one stood to defend Stuart on Tuesday, or Matthew Fontaine Maury when the city took him down the week before. Or Jefferson Davis when protesters hauled him down last month.
On July 1, when a state law took effect giving localities the power to remove war memorials from their own property, Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney (D) said the statues were coming down as a safety measure to prevent protesters from getting hurt. Instead, people who once felt unwelcome in this part of town have transformed the avenue into a monument of their own. The granite bases of the statues are splashed with colorful graffiti — some profane and angry, some in memory of African Americans killed by police. But it’s the people — all ages, all races — who constitute the biggest transformation of all, flocking to public spaces that once stood grand and empty and filling them with speeches and music and chanting.
The state law requires a process of public comments and votes by local authorities, but Stoney didn’t want to wait. “I grew up around here … Any time before the last month, you would not see a soul out here,” said one young man, 25, who declined to give his name as he stood with an assault-style rifle in an encampment near the Lee statue on Monday. He said he feared reprisals from statue defenders, who sometimes show up at night in small groups, or from police.
The 39-year-old African American mayor defied the advice of his city attorney, who said the government needed to give a day’s notice before the council could vote on removal. In ordering the dismantling of the statues without a council vote, Stoney invoked an emergency declaration that Northam had extended at his request. Meat cooking on a grill, people resting on folding chairs in the shade near small tents, the encampment is an area where protesters can get water, homeless people can get food and Monument Avenue residents can talk with protesters about what’s going on.
A statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson came down last Wednesday during a thunderstorm as at least 1,000 people looked on and cheered. A statue of Confederate naval figure Matthew Fontaine Maury was removed the following day. “This is all love — all community coming together,” said the young man, whose shirt read “Legalize Being Black.” Asked how his firearm fit in with a message of love, he replied that protesters have felt threatened at night and want to show that they have the same right to bear arms as anyone else.
Stoney’s office said removal of the Stuart statue was delayed because the large crane required to lift it was not available over the July Fourth holiday weekend. For an older generation of African Americans, the statues represented a painful past that many had long since given up on reconciling.
The Stuart statue was unveiled in 1907, the second figure placed on the avenue, after Lee in 1890. Last year, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts drew national attention by unveiling a statue by artist Kehinde Wiley that depicts a modern African American man on a horse in a pose modeled after the Stuart statue. “I think they should make them all mechanical and put quarters in them so the kids can ride them,” said a man who would only give his name as Michael, age 69. He said he grew up in the city’s public housing projects, and as a young man, “we didn’t come over this way, okay? If you were black they would arrest you or call the cops on you if you walked on the grass out here on the traffic circle.”
Wren Vessel, who gave his age as “over 60,” grew up in rural King and Queen County and used to come into town with his father selling tomatoes, green beans and butter beans at the Shockoe Bottom farmers market.
He recalled a time that he and his brother tried to get a hot dog at a diner near the market, but the line was too long at the door marked “colored.” He was so young that he didn’t understand what segregation was.
The statues were like that, too, he said. At first they just seemed like big works of art. But as Vessel learned more about them, he came to understand the history of racial injustice suggested by their very presence. If blacks had been given true equality after the Civil War, he said, the statues might never have been built.
“My vision is for my grandkids and all people — not just my grandkids, but all kids regardless of race — that we have a more fair society. And the Constitution’s not just a piece of paper, but it’s something we live by,” he said.
Still, Vessel hesitated when asked if he saw removal of the monuments as progress.
“Well, I see it as a chapter,” he said. “We’ll see what the next chapter is, and we’ll see where it goes.”
Aaron Wade, 29, flew to Richmond late last month from Los Angeles to see the spectacle in the town where he was born and raised.
“I didn’t want to miss a piece of history in my hometown. I couldn’t do it,” Wade, who is African American, said on Thursday as he watched work crews dismantle a statue to Confederate naval figure Matthew Fontaine Maury. “Just being from here, I know what a lot of these monuments meant.”
Wade grew up in the east end of Richmond and attended Benedictine, a Catholic boy’s high school then located in the city’s Fan district, just blocks from the monuments. As a member of school’s cross-country team, he ran by them all the time.
“Monument Avenue was a part of the six miles that we had to run, so going past a lot of these monuments, you know, you become numb to it because it’s so part of the ingrained history,” he said.
His wife — Maria Warith-Wade, 26, a filmmaker — said she had a very different experience with the statues.
“I had parents that were very much into social movements and history,” she said, “and so I never had the privilege of seeing them as, you know, these beautiful things.”
Her family took her to historic sites around Virginia, she said, but always made sure she knew the full story. They went to historic Jamestown, but also learned about Gabriel, an enslaved man who led a failed revolt in Richmond in 1800.
Warith-Wade said she tried to use those perspectives to see the statues from the point of view of the people who erected them. “The women of the Confederacy, I think that they really wanted to make something beautiful for what they believed in. And if I were in their shoes, maybe I would have thought that way — I don’t know; I’m not a white woman.”
Now, she hopes, there’s a chance to do something truly beautiful. “I really hope that one day, we’re able to see a lot of these spots on Monument Avenue reclaimed in a way that is welcoming to all the Richmond community,” she said.
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