Five years ago today George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer. His death led to a renewed call to deal with this nation’s long and painful history of racism and white supremacy.
It also led to the most concerted effort to remove Confederate monuments from public spaces. By 2020, Confederate monuments had already come down in places like Baltimore, New Orleans, Dallas, and Raleigh following the murder of nine churchgoers in Charleston in 2015 and the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.
Nothing, however, could have prepared the country for what followed Floyd’s death. Since May 2020, over 120 monuments have been removed in towns and cities throughout the former Confederate states and beyond.
The most striking transformation took place in Richmond, Virginia—the former capital of the Confederacy, where five massive monuments, honoring Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, J.E.B. Stuart, and Matthew Fontaine Maury, lined Monument Avenue.
In the days after Floyd’s murder, Richmonders took to the streets, venting their frustration and anger by “tagging” the monuments and even pulling down a statue of Jefferson Davis.
In addition to the monuments, the national headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy was fire bombed and defaced.
Looking back on the events of the last five years, we can begin to see the radical transformation that has taken place in Civil War memory, specifically through the way the monuments were leveraged by Richmonders before the final removal of the Robert E. Lee monument on September 8, 2021.
The time between the initial demonstrations and their removal gave Richmonders the opportunity to rewrite the history of Monument Avenue by imposing their own values and agenda on these public spaces.
When its history is written, it is this final chapter that will likely overshadow the rest of the story. The significance of this cannot be overestimated.
The statue of Jefferson Davis that was pulled down early on in the demonstrations was eventually exhibited face up on the ground at Richmond’s Valentine Museum, where visitors and students could learn more about this final chapter as well as the broader history of Monument Avenue.
This reinterpretation of the monuments took many forms, including the tagging of the monuments as well as through speeches, voting drives, memorials, music, dance, and the installation of temporary wayside markers.
All of this contributed to a reexamination and reintepretation of the monuments. Arguably, no monument site proved to be more important than that of Robert E. Lee, which quickly became a gathering place for all Richmonders as opposed to its original purpose of reinforcing segregation through a celebration of the Lost Cause.