Monument Avenue: Erection and Removal
Near Richmond, Virginia
Monument Avenue is a wide, tree-lined boulevard in the residential West End of Richmond. Between nineteen hundred and the nineteen twenties, it expanded into one of the most architecturally distinguished residential streets in the United States, lined with Georgian and Italianate houses, churches, and apartment buildings that the American Planning Association called one of the ten greatest streets in America in two thousand seven. But the avenue was built around something else.
It was conceived as a memorial boulevard for the Confederacy. Richmond had been the Confederate capital, and after the war's end the city became a central location for the Lost Cause movement, which sought to memorialize the Confederate dead and reframe the war's meaning. The first statue came in eighteen ninety: a mounted Robert E.
Lee on a sixty-foot granite pedestal, sculpted by Marius-Jean-Antonin Mercié. Over the following decades, statues of J.E.
B. Stuart, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and Matthew Fontaine Maury went up along the boulevard. They were imposing in scale and deliberate in message: bronze Confederate leaders presiding over a residential neighborhood built after Reconstruction.
In nineteen ninety-six, a statue of Arthur Ashe was added, the first to honor someone who was not a Confederate officer. The addition was controversial at the time. Some objected to placing Ashe on the same avenue as the Confederate figures.
Others objected to the statue's scale and style. In the summer of twenty twenty, following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, protests in Richmond turned to the Confederate monuments. The Jefferson Davis statue was torn down by demonstrators.
Richmond's mayor, Levar Stoney, ordered the city's remaining Confederate monuments removed from their pedestals in July twenty twenty. The Robert E. Lee monument, owned by the Commonwealth rather than the city, came down on September eighth, twenty twenty-one, on order of Governor Ralph Northam.
All of the Confederate monuments and their pedestals have since been removed. Arthur Ashe remains, his bronze figure at the western end of a boulevard that has changed enormously in meaning without changing much in appearance.
