We should have known this day was coming, because they knew this day was coming.
The extrication of Richmond from the clutches of its white-supremacist symbols was never going to be as simple as loosening a few bolts and pushing the levers on a crane.
The architects of Lost Cause dogma protected their bronze idols with an arsenal of fail-safes. Removing Confederate statues from Monument Avenue always was going to be a fight — and a prelude to the much more difficult task of purging the legacy of white supremacy.
And so it has come to pass with an injunction preventing Gov. Ralph Northam, at least temporarily, from removing Robert E. Lee from his pedestal following a complaint that its removal is in violation of the 1890 deed giving the state control of the property.
Artist Kehinde Wiley foreshadowed this moment with his “Rumors of War” statue — a prophesy of cultural evolution and the turmoil that can envelope it.
On Sunday, a Hanover County man was arrested after allegedly driving his pickup truck into a crowd of Black Lives Matter demonstrators marching on Lakeside Avenue en route to the monument of Confederate General A.P. Hill.
Resistance to change is the Virginia Way, even as our elected officials trend more progressive. This is no moment for a victory lap; the battle still is joined.
William C. Gregory, great-grandson of the couple who conveyed the Lee Circle to the state in 1890, says the removal of the Lee statue as planned would cause the monument “irreparable harm.”
He argues that the state, in its acceptance of the property, guaranteed that the statue, pedestal and circle would be “perpetually sacred” and that the state would “faithfully guard it and affectionately protect it.”
And so the deification of Confederate iconography began. It was not enough to inscribe protections in the state code for the Lee statue and its ideological brethren; the Lee monument should be protected by word and deed as well, if you buy Gregory’s argument.
Richmond Circuit Judge Bradley Cavedo just might. On Monday, he issued a 10-day injunction blocking the Lee statue’s removal from its pedestal, citing “a likelihood of irreparable harm to the statue.”
“It is in the public interest to await resolution of this case on the merits prior to removal of the statue by defendants, and the public interest weighs in favor of maintaining the status quo,” the injunction reads.
It was never in the public interest to build or maintain this monument; Robert E. Lee himself said as much.
“I think it wiser,” he wrote in 1869, “... not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”
This legal wrangling misses the point: Irreparable harm already has been done to Virginia’s black citizens, whose ancestors had no real say in the erection of these tributes to men who fought to rip the Union asunder in defense of slavery.
“The purpose of this monument was to recast Virginia’s history; to recast it to fit a narrative that minimized a devastating evil perpetrated on African Americans during the darkest part of our past,” Rita Davis, counsel to the governor, said Tuesday.
Northam’s decision to press forward with its removal “takes us a step closer to reclaiming the truth of Virginia’s history, and to reclaim it for all Virginians, and we look forward to defending that in court.”
The deal struck in 1890 was born out of bad faith and foreshadowed the state stripping its black citizens of their Reconstruction era-rights at the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1902.
Today, these monuments perpetuate a racist ideology that still plagues our nation. The Lakeside incident is a chilling reminder of what transpired on Aug. 12, 2017, in Charlottesville following a rally of white supremacists, neo-Confederates and neo-Nazis, assembled in part to protest the threatened removal of Confederate monuments. White supremacist James Alex Fields Jr. plowed his car into a crowd of protesters, killing Heather Heyer.
As if operating from the same playbook, an armed man in Seattle drove his car into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters and shot a bystander, also on Sunday.
Harry H. Rogers of Hanover County has been charged in the Lakeside incident. Henrico Commonwealth’s Attorney Shannon Taylor is considering hate crime charges. She said the defendant is “an admitted leader of the Ku Klux Klan and a propagandist for Confederate ideology.”
When it comes to Confederate propagandists, it’s hard to top the city of Richmond and the commonwealth of Virginia. It’s past time for both to get out of the hate crime business.
