The Life of Monument Avenue

On Robert E. Lee’s 132nd birthday, Anita Louise Hackett joined the U.D.C’s Richmond Chapter Vice President C.R. Blankenship to lay a wreath. Ms. Hackett spent her career teaching in Richmond Public Schools.

The Richmond Chapter of the U.D.C. honored Jefferson Davis’ birthday, again, in 1935.

The U.D.C. created and monitored a memorial landscape and a very narrow public memory of the Confederacy in textbooks, statues, a public programs across the United States.

The Elliott Grays Chapter of the U.D.C. from Manchester laid wreaths at J.E.B. Stuart’s monument then walked ten blocks to raise a flag at the West Grace Street home where Stuart died in 1864.

On Robert E. Lee’s birthday in 1941, the governor, the mayor, and color guards from the Richmond Light Infantry Blues (pictured) attended services at St. Paul’s Church. The U.D.C. laid wreaths on Lee’s monument and students assembled at the Robert Fulton School in the East End to offer song recitals.

Journalist and Lee biographer Douglas Southall Freeman broadcast over the NBC radio network a speech entitled “Robert E. Lee as Counselor of National Defense.” Freeman used Lee to call for resolute military preparation as European countries entered the fight against fascists.

World War II muted Jefferson Davis birthday observances. In 1942 state offices and banks closed, but “for most people in the city, it was just another Wednesday.”

The U.D.C. assembled at St. Paul’s Church for a service, and those who could not get away from home could listen to Mrs. Fitzhugh Lee Brauer deliver an address about Davis on radio station WMBG.

Six hundred and fifty Virginians, dubbed the “Lee Volunteers,” assembled at the Lee Monument to enlist in the United States Navy in August, 1942.

With events like these, new generations learned to associate Lee, the Confederate general, to contemporary American patriotism.

The Lee Volunteers fulfilled the wishes of both Douglas S. Freeman and the original monument builders who appealed to military fortitude of Lee, Stuart, Davis, and Jackson. These living monuments marched off to war around the globe.

Automobiles brought paved roads and tourists. The Jefferson Hotel offered guides to historic Richmond for its well-heeled and mobile visitors.

The "Tour of Historic Richmond" took visitors down Monument Avenue.

Real estate agents used Monument Avenue as a selling point for homes, apartments, and businesses.

One advertiser misspelled Stuart's last name, suggesting that knowledge of Confederate history lagged behind reverence for the Confederate past.

Yet by the 1930s, as the number of renters exceeded the number of homeowners, and as middle class people moved deeper into the West End, Monument Avenue lost some of its luster.

The Federal Housing Authority assessed Monument Avenue in 1940: “The peak has passed.”

Robert Leon Bacon fled Virginia’s racism in 1955 and wrote back to the governor. Bacon said, “I cannot go on Monument Ave. and visit a white girl from fear of being ‘lynched’ or beaten up or arrested or electrocuted.”

Bacon did not necessarily refer to the Confederate statues, but certainly he knew that white people could use violence and threats to prevent interracial mingling and a black presence in white neighborhoods like Monument Avenue.

Bacon detailed his particular fear of going to Monument Avenue.

During the 100th anniversary of the Civil War, when Richmond built the modernist Centennial Dome, a Civil War visitor center intended to draw history-minded travelers from the burgeoning tourist axis of Washington, D.C., and Colonial Williamsburg, the Richmond Tour directed visitors from the state capitol, toward Chimborazo, and then back around to go up Boulevard with a grand finale cruise back down Monument Avenue.

Richmond Tour highlights along Monument Avenue in the 1960s.

By the mid-1960s, Monument Avenue had become a congested commuter corridor, with too much traffic and frequent collisions between cars and the iron gates that did not quite protect the statues.

The statues themselves became dingy with half a century’s worth of grime and corrosion.

In 1965 the Richmond City Planning Commission issued a study designed to make Monument Avenue more suitable for high-volume automobile tourism, and expand its capacity as a historical destination.

They had sidestepped Monument Avenue’s Confederate legacy and elevated the street as a center of landscape and urban design.

Planners discovered that the density of trees and infrequency of monuments added up to an unpleasant visual rhythm for motorists.

Planners proposed to move the J.E.B. Stuart statue to the corner of Monument Avenue and North Lombardy to clear the thoroughfare.

They also proposed a new Confederate statue to improve the visual rhythm of Monument Avenue at 40 miles per hour.

Though the Planning Commission’s grand vision failed to come to fruition, the city did begin modernizing Monument Avenue’s surface. The move provoked the street’s residents, led by Helen Marie Taylor, to organize the Monument Avenue Preservation Society. MAPS motivated residents to preserve the district’s historic character.

In 1966, at the urging of Roland Reynolds, marketing director of Richmond-based Eskimo Pie and member of the Reynolds aluminum family, Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali offered a concept for a statue of Confederate hospital administrator Sally Tompkins.

Bill Wynne, a Richmond advertising executive, sketched Dali’s idea that likened Tompkins to St. George, slaying the dragon of disease.

Though never a serious proposal, Dali’s concept anticipated a vibrant future.

Well into the 1990s, Richmond’s tourism officials promoted Monument Avenue as a destination, and as one face of the city.

Throughout the late 20th Century, Monument Avenue continued to be a site of Confederate memory. Between 1965 and the early 1990s, the U.D.C. hosted an annual “Massing of the Flags” at the Jefferson Davis Memorial, and later, at its headquarters on Boulevard. The Sons of Confederate Veterans hosted similar ceremonies at Hollywood Cemetery to celebrate Jefferson Davis’ birthday.

The Monument Avenue Preservation Society, inspired by resident Zayde Dotts, sponsored the first Easter on Parade along Monument Avenue in 1973.

The event has featured dancers, artists, costumes, music, and dogs dressed in Easter costumes.

The Monument Avenue 10K race began in 2000. Sponsored originally by the Ukrops grocery store chain and sanctioned by USA Track and Field, up to 25,000 people have crossed the finish line per year, making it one of the most popular 10K races in the United States.

In the early 1990s, the Richmond City Council proposed that a statue of Richmond native and tennis great Arthur Ashe be installed on Monument Avenue. Some opponents insisted that the street was an exclusively Confederate sanctuary.

The Arthur Ashe statue was unveiled in 1996.

Opponents brought their case to the statue unveiling on July 10, 1996, but where overwhelmed by the thousands who had gathered to celebrate the occasion.

In the 21st Century, many in Richmond objected to placing the monuments at the center of Richmond’s identity as a modern, inclusive, city.

The Union Cycliste Internationale bicycle races featured Monument Avenue while the editors of the Richmond Defender newspaper asked, “Will [Richmond] fearlessly face the truth of its origins in slavery and the slave trade? Or will it gloss over this past and continue to pay homage to the symbols of oppression?”

In the 2010s, the Jefferson Davis Monument was tagged with graffiti almost as regularly as it had been marked by birthday wreaths a century before.

Virginia Commonwealth University students at the mOb studio offered whimsical and critical reconsiderations on the Lee Monument in 2016.

In 2017 opponents of the national alt-right movement, which rallied in support of Confederate monuments, marched from the new Maggie Walker memorial to the J.E.B. Stuart monument to protest white supremacy. The Coalition for Accountability, advocating for schools, immigration reform, and LGBTQ rights, marched from the Lee Monument to Shockoe Bottom, the site of the African Burial Ground and Devil’s Half Acre.

Both marches connected Monument Avenue to Richmond’s larger historical landscape, and both called for the removal of Confederate monuments.

Family at art walk, 2012.

Black Lives Matter protestors silently raise their fists at the Jefferson Davis Memorial on June 3, 2020.

In June and July, 2020, Black Lives Matter protestors projected portraits of Black figures from Harriet Tubman to George Floyd on the Lee Monument.

On July 1, 2020, the city of Richmond began removing Confederate statues from Monument Avenue in order to preserve "public safety," starting with Stonewall Jackson. The city subsequently removed the monuments to Matthew Fontaine Maury and JEB Stuart. Their future is pending a larger community discussion.

From the U.D.C. to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, Richmonders have projected their values onto the statues on Monument Avenue, and the street will continue to be used to define the city's identity.