George Floyd and the Writing of the Final Chapter of Richmond's Confederate Monuments
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.
People, who were never envisioned as homeowners by monument boosters, real estate developers, and the people who eventually made the West End neighborhood their home, gathered at the base of the monument and took ownership of the space by imposing their own shared history on the monument itself.
The most powerful way in which this was accomplished was through the images projected onto the monument at night. This began over the summer of 2020 with projections of George Floyd, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and John Lewis. Of all the forms of reinterpretation witnessed the turning of Lee’s massive pedestal into a screen on which to project images of African Americans proved to be the most potent.
One of my favorite images was that of a soldier who served in the United States Colored Troops. I suspect that the choice of soldier was no accident.
This picture is of Sergeant Nimrod Burke. Originally from Prince William County, Virginia, his family had been freed and moved to Ohio. In 1861, Burke was a teamster and scout for the 36th Ohio infantry. In 1864, he joined the 23rd USCT and was promoted to sergeant. This picture is widely circulated—in some cases, as an unidentified soldier. His family now has a website devoted to him.
Burke is just one of many of the soldiers in the 23rd who were from Virginia. We have traced men back to the city of Fredericksburg and the counties of Caroline, Culpeper, Fauquier, Orange, Prince William, Rappahannock, Spotsylvania, and Stafford. Many of these men escaped from slavery during the Union occupation of Fredericksburg from April to early September 1862, when over 12,000 slaves escaped their ‘masters.’ These men escaped only to come back and fight with the United States Colored Troops – many of them with the 23rd USCT.
The choice of Burke served as a reminder of the role that thousands of Black Virginians played in helping to preserve the Union, end slavery, and destroy the Confederacy. But the juxtaposition of the image and the Lee monument was also a reminder that the Confederate monument landscape all but obliterated the history of Black Virginians during the Civil War, reducing them to “loyal slaves.”
The delay in removal afforded Richmonders the opportunity to rewrite the history of the Lee monument and Civil War memory in Virginia, but more importantly, the efforts of activists and artists, and the participation of the broader community placed the city of Richmond in a unique position where it could engage in the hard work of transforming this space into something that reflects the shared values and history of everyone.
Five years later, however, and the city appears to be no closer to achieving that goal.
In the meantime, right-wingers are engaged in rewriting of the narrative surrounding George Floyd’s death:
In the right’s retelling, Floyd did not die from being deprived of air, and Chauvin was railroaded by a country that flew into a panic over race and did not consider the facts soberly. To build this case, conservatives have packaged misleading details from court documents, images of burning and looting during the protests, Floyd’s criminal record and drug use, and legal theories that lawyers say are distorted.
In their hands, the nation overreacted to Floyd’s death in its attempt to reckon with the long history of racism and white supremacy. This attempt to shape public memory is part of a much larger campaign, on the part of the Trump administration, to control the broader discussion about race and history that we have seen over the past few months and which I have been documenting on this site.
Through all of this, however, the Confederate monuments removed from Richmond’s Monument Avenue remain covered at a nearby wastewater treatment plant.
Their future and the locations they once called home remain uncertain as well as the larger question of whether we as Americans have the strength to confront our complicated past.
The History News Network, associated with Edward L. Ayers, invites its newsletter recipients to nominate for possible reprinting in the newsletter "your favorite history piece from the week" via a short form (https://www.bunkhistory.org/recommend, and don't let that word "bunk" mislead you; it's just Professor Ayers's sense of humor; he's the founder of HNN's new incarnation, and he's alluding to Henry Ford's ignorant statement about history).
I just nominated this post. Here's what I wrote in the box "Reason for submission": In "George Floyd and the Writing of the Final Chapter of Richmond's Confederate Monuments," the veteran Civil War scholar and public historian Kevin M. Levin, author and publisher of the Substack _Civil War Memory_, has made another especially worthy contribution to the national discussion.
For the post's URL, I put https://kevinmlevin.substack.com/p/george-floyd-and-the-writing-of-the
Maybe others will nominate this fine essay too. As a Virginian who remembers Massive Resistance closing my sister's junior high school for a whole year, and closing my elementary school for two weeks, I especially like this analysis.
Now if we could only get statues on Richmond's Monument Avenue of Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend--the precipitating self-emancipators of the self-emancipation movement.
I was struck by the events in Richmond in summer 2020 and remain so. it was one of the most powerful examples of “change the statue to give it new meaning” I’d ever seen in the US.
The Lee statue also inspired “No Sooner Was It Over, than the Memory Made it Nobler” a chapter in David Allison’s Controversial Monuments & Memorials (which you might also have a chapter in?)