Consider This from NPR - The Fight Over Confederate Statues, And How They Could Tell Another Story

Episode Date: July 23, 2020

Monument Avenue is a large, tree-lined street in Richmond, Virginia that used to have several confederate statues and monuments. In the wake of protests against racism and police brutality, the city has removed most of them. But a monument of Robert E. Lee still stands — for now. Even before the statues started coming down, WVTF's Mallory Noe-Payne reports that Richmond residents began reclaiming the space where it stands. And historian Julian Hayter tells NPR's Scott Simon there's a way for confederate statues to tell a different story. Find and support your local public radio station.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

We have seen it all over the country. Statues coming down. It happened in Richmond, Virginia, up and down a place called Monument Avenue, this big tree-lined street that, until just a few months ago, had five Confederate statues and monuments. The city took three of them down. Protesters took down another one. And now there's only one left.

Actually, the biggest one of all. It's in the middle of a traffic circle on land owned by the state. The angry part of me, the resentful part of me, wants to get a hammer and just beat the statue into oblivion and never talk about it again. This guy who's looking up at the statue, which is about 60 feet tall, is Rob W. Lee. The man up there was his great-great-great-great-uncle, Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

Rob is a pastor and an author. And as you can hear, he's pretty clear. He wants that statue to come down. This is an uprising of the people. This is not something that's happening, you know, in back rooms and back room handshakes. This is an uprising of the people. This is not something that's happening, you know, in back rooms and back room handshakes. This is people. And that's what's important. And to me, what choice do they have? Now's the time. But because the statue is on state land, the debate about taking it down has been complicated. Yes, that statue has been there for a long time.

But it was wrong then, and it is wrong now. That's Governor Ralph Northam. His administration has asked a judge to overturn an injunction that has been keeping the statue up. I know many people will be angry, but my friends, I believe in a Virginia that studies its past in an honest way. The story of that injunction that's keeping the statue up is kind of a long story. Here's the short version. A descendant of the family who gave the land to the state more than 100 years ago says the governor is supposed to be a custodian of the statue and that he doesn't have a right to take the statue down. Today, the judge said he would take these arguments under advisement and will issue a written opinion.

So for now, the statue stays up. This isn't just about a statue. This isn't just about a history that you've read somewhere in a middle school textbook. This is about a family member who enslaved people, who fought for the continued enslavement of those people, who devastated an entire region. Coming up, who got to write our history and how do we correct that history? This is Consider This from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. It's Thursday, July 23rd.

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Integrative Therapeutics, creator of Physician's Elemental Diet, a medical food developed by clinicians for the dietary management of IBS, IBD, and SIBO under the supervision of a physician. So, yeah, that statue of Robert E. Lee could come down soon. Even though the judge still hasn't made a final decision, people in Richmond are already reclaiming the space where the statue stands. Mallory Nopain from member station WVTF reports on how that space went from a segregated enclave for white people to what it is today. It's a scene few Richmonders would have imagined even a couple months ago. A trio of black musicians playing under the shadow of Robert E. Lee.

Trombone player Isaiah Robinson says he doesn't even consider the looming Confederate general. When I'm playing, I don't think about him. I think about my ancestors. You know what I'm saying? And every time I think about them, it makes me play harder. You know what I'm saying? I feel a spirit. For weeks, Richmonders have taken over the circle of land at the base of the monument, grilling out, playing games. Michelle Bebs says it used to only be white people, really, walking on Monument Avenue. If you're black, you get a funny look being here, like you don't belong. But now it just feels comfortable and it feels good. This transformation is all the more radical, given Monument Avenue's origin story. It begins with the unveiling of the Lee Monument in 1890 to a crowd of 150,000 people. Kevin Levin is a Civil War historian. He says

the monuments were the centerpieces of an exclusive real estate development. This was a neighborhood set aside specifically for white Richmonders to raise their families, but also a place where white Richmonders and others could come to celebrate the generals who fought in the 1860s, who fought for the Confederacy. At the same time, lynchings in Virginia spiked and Black representation in the state legislature plummeted. Levin says this broad, tree-lined avenue where residents got paved streets and electric lights did the insidious work of relegating African Americans to second-class status. It's not just the monuments that helped to reinforce this racial divide. It's everything that comes along for the ride, everything that white Richmonders and white Southerners

benefited from. Despite those barriers, Richmond's Black community resisted. The response is to keep on living. Joseph Rogers is a historian at the American Civil War Museum. It concentrated itself by just being in community with each other and trying to build up the best communities that they could. Parts of the segregated city became known as Black Wall Street and the Harlem of the South. Today, when Rogers thinks of monuments in Richmond, he doesn't just think of Monument Avenue, but of a statue one block away of the black entrepreneur Maggie Walker. And she's in mid-stride, ready to cross that street and bridge that gap. And I think that we have done it. We've

taken that step with her and for her, and we've really reclaimed that space, and we have made it inclusive for everyone. Back at the Lee Monument, things are quieter in the morning. A man naps in the shade. A couple people play chess. Richminder Howard Hopkins has always viewed this space as a threat, no different than the burning cross he says was left in his family's yard when he was a child. You know, I may have written down it, but I never stopped. That changed recently. He rushed down here to watch as crews removed the first monument,

lifting General Stonewall Jackson off his pedestal. From the moving it up to moving it over, each one of those movements was representation of we are in a place that the world is beginning to change. Critics say removing Confederate monuments erases our history, but Hopkins says we're simply writing the next chapter. Mallory Nopain from NPR member station WVTF. We said earlier that on Richmond's Monument Avenue, there used to be other statues of Confederate leaders. One of those was Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy.

A local commission had recommended it be removed. Two years later, protesters tore it down. Julian Hader is a historian who was on that commission. He teaches at the University of Richmond, and he talked to my colleague Scott Simon about how these monuments came to exist and what should happen to them going forward. Remind us why those statues are up, because they were put up by officials in states that had, after all, lost a civil war. Right. So these monuments are in many ways part and parcel of what we call the lost cause. You know, 600 and some odd thousand people died during the Civil War, which is twice as many people that died in the Second World War. And I think people had to make sense of that, especially Southerners.

Many of them didn't know what the punishment was going to be for the Civil War. And I think the Lost Cause is a way to justify, rationalize, and make sense of their part in the Confederacy and what many consider treason. And what we begin to see over the twilight of the 19th century is Southerners coming up with these kind of crafty mythologies to rationalize not only the Civil War, but also slavery, but even more importantly, the rise of Jim Crow segregation. Professor Hader, what about the argument that as reprehensible as what those statues might represent, you can't erase history, and the best thing is to put up plaques that explain who those people really were, something like that. that African Americans were happy slaves and unprepared for freedom, that the Civil War was

about states' rights and not slavery, and that Confederate leadership were heroes. A sizable number of Americans still believe lost cause talking points. And I think what people have resolved to do is say, sure, it's difficult to erase history, but what history and what kind of false narrative are we willing to promote and let linger? Do you think those monuments, if they come down, should go into storage, go to some private collector, or be melted down? I think if those monuments are put in a warehouse, it is a squandered opportunity to deal with this false narrative that I continue to bring up. And this is just the beginning of a

much larger movement to deal with all of the other manifestations and symbols of Jim Crow segregation that continue to have an influence on the nature of Southern cities. Confederate statuary is the only relic to the lost cause and segregation. We've got an obsolescently segregated public school system in the city of Richmond. We've got residential segregation and the compression of poverty that still affects the very fabric of the city. It'd be wise to use these statues as a teachable talking point to familiarize people with the kind of perpetuation of African-American serfdom that characterized Jim Crow segregation and those monuments sent to entrench.

So I think it'd be a wasted opportunity to put those things away in a warehouse or melt them down without telling a counter narrative that finally begins to do its due diligence against the perpetuation of these terrible ideas. As we mentioned, you were part of that commission that made recommendations to the city in 2018 that would add historical markers and make space for monuments and other memorials along Monument Avenue, including Arthur Ashe, Richmond's own. How would you like Monument Avenue to look in the future? You know, I think the Kehinde Wiley statue that they put up on Arthur Ashe Boulevard is a great start. Rumors of War is actually a play on the J.E.B. Stewart statue on Monument Avenue. It's an African-American with Nikes and dreadlocks. It in many ways begins to

re-interrogate the lost cause and the shelf life of Confederate statuary in a way that I think has some ways given us a way forward, the kinds of artistic latitude that you have with monuments to tell another story. So I think that's a good start. Julian Hader at the University of Richmond with my colleague Scott Simon. Additional reporting in this episode from Brianna Scott, who talked to Rob W. Lee, and from our colleagues at All Things Considered. For more news, download the NPR One app or listen to your local public radio station. Supporting that station is what makes this podcast possible. So thank you. I'm Kelly McEvers. We will be back with more tomorrow.

Until recently, Edmund Hong says he didn't speak out against racism because he was scared. My parents told me not to speak up because they were scared. But I'm tired of this. Listen now on the Code Switch podcast from NPR.