Reenvisioning Richmond's Past: Race, Reconciliation, and Public History in the Modern South, 1990–Present

Abstract

Reenvisioning Richmond's Past:Race, Reconciliation, and Public History in the Modern South, 1990–Present Marvin T. Chiles (bio) Richmond, Virginia, is more than the former Confederate capital: it is a city seeking to end its complicity with American racism. Nothing encapsulates Richmond's desire for an inclusive multiracial identity better than the movement to withdraw Confederate monuments from the southern landscape. After national tragedies in Charleston, South Carolina (2015), and Charlottesville, Virginia (2017), southern cities both large and small removed statues that honored Confederate heroes.1 Richmond half-heartedly joined this movement in the summer of 2017, when Mayor Levar M. Stoney's ad hoc commission considered the removal of the Jefferson Davis statue, along with the reinterpretation of other Confederate relics, on the city's famous Monument Avenue. Yet, as statues came down in New Orleans, Baltimore, Austin, Texas, and Durham, North Carolina, by the fall of 2017 Richmonders had not reinterpreted [End Page 707] or expelled any Lost Cause statues from their public sphere.2 The social unrest stemming from the police killing of Black Minneapolis man George Floyd in the summer of 2020, however, compelled the nine members of the Richmond city council to vote unanimously for the removal of the Confederate statues from Monument Avenue. Mayor Stoney carried out most of that plan by defying a court injunction and removing the statue of Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson in July 2020. Soon all of these once hallowed, now controversial relics lay tarnished with spray paint in a water treatment facility just outside the city. By the summer of 2020, support for removing every Confederate statue from the avenue was bipartisan and biracial, whereas just a few years before, removals were nearly unfathomable.3 This seismic shift in public thought appears on the surface to have been a knee-jerk reaction to national events—a desire to put Richmond in line with the rest of the South and the nation, as many viewed monument removal as a major step to stem the uptick in white supremacist violence since the Barack Obama presidency.4 However, this article argues that Richmond's removal of Confederate monuments began in the early 1990s, when a neighborhood organization, the museum community, and business elites aligned on using public history to rid Richmond of its racist identity. This essay examines archival papers, public records, interviews, and newspapers of the formerly arch-conservative city of Richmond to [End Page 708] better understand the more recent removal of Confederate monuments. In the process, it argues that the 2020 removals were rooted in previous efforts to divorce the city from its racist heritage. This story begins not on Monument Avenue but in the Near West End Carillon neighborhood. Here, in the early 1990s, a biracial organization called Hope in the Cities (HIC), with the help of the museum community and Black grassroots organizations, used Richmond's history with slavery to address the persistence of de facto segregation. It marked the first time since the modern civil rights movement that progressive organizations dominated public discussions about race relations and public identity in Richmond. Business and political elites had unsuccessfully used urban revitalization to reshape Richmond's identity and improve race relations in the 1970s and 1980s; however, they had been more concerned with healing the economy than with mending social divides between Black and white city residents.5 Neighborhood groups, grassroots organizations, and the museum community coordinated efforts to place Black history in Richmond's public history mainstream, making the city's public history movement a part of a national reckoning on race in the 1990s. Richmond showcased its evolving race relations and progressive public history shift with the Healing the Heart of America conference in 1993 and the erection of the Arthur Ashe statue on Monument Avenue in 1996. Both events thrust Richmond into the national spotlight, as urban leaders across the country not only attended the conference and celebrated the Ashe statue, but also asked HIC to help them use inclusive public history narratives to solve racial issues in their own cities. As Richmond moved into the twenty-first century—a time thought to be witnessing the flowering of multiculturalism in America...