I live in Henrico County which wraps around the city of Richmond, VA to the north and west. I live west of the city. A pretty small media market nationally in spite of being the capital for the state. What has happened here has not had much in the way of national attention. No real reason for it to. It’s no different anywhere else.
But this was the capital of a briefly held nation also. Though mostly in the rear view, there are those that have not let go, and at one time the state didn’t either, and the vestiges of those times are monuments. To what depends on where you stand.
For over a century it has not mattered where you stand. There wasn’t a stand. Confederate monuments stated what might go out of favor in polite company cocktail talk. They stood night after night, year after year, decade after decade defending the great unsaid.
A lot of folks here wish they’d won.
That had been the motivation when the monuments were erected. Honor the fallen heroes of the Lost Cause. Give voice to the pain of losing. In the north where I grew up, the conclusion of the war was morally inevitable, or it felt that way. Down here there are tons of people that will fight, and I mean fight, when it is suggested that the Civil War had any connection to slavery. Point out that it is in the very preambles of every Confederate state’s constitution, and the fun begins, but it never ends. Never.
It seems this has been overcome, but of course it hasn’t, and there will be push back that will border on obscenity. We elect People of Color to the highest offices, governors, presidents, but underneath the high profile successes are the systemic, cooked-in, grinding, unfazed processes that maintain an “other” status. No one thinks it’s them. That’s how the high profile guys get elected. We actually think racism doesn’t affect us. I voted for Obama! We have created a society with plausible deniability for the majority. Even if you don’t identify yourself as racist, to think you are not a beneficiary of the system simply means you don’t interact in the places that it happens. Because it doesn’t happen to you. So it doesn’t happen.
If you have been in the court system for any reason that an average person might you have probably been treated decently, pleaded not guilty to the ticket and they listened to why and you at least got your shot. You won, you lost, but you already knew what the worst case was going to be, because there are guidelines and that sort of thing. For PoC, things can frequently spin out of control, spiraling to a place that was not predictable, worst case scenarios suddenly seeming quaint.
They may not reach the court.
In judicial news in our Greater Richmond community, a county circuit judge granted a 10 day injunction against the removal of the Robert E. Lee monument on Monument Avenue from an upscale part of the city that had been ordered by the governor of the state, Ralph Northam. The suit was brought by William C. Gregory who cited an 1890 deed that documented the transfer of the land the monument stood on from the state to the city which required that the receivers of this gift “…faithfully guard and affectionately protect it.” We don’t just have to protect it, we have to adore it. The plaintiff is the great grand-son of two signatories to the deed.
Folks, this shit dies hard. It’s generational, it’s inherited and passed on from family to family, generation to generation. Power is never just relinquished. It is overwhelmed, or it maintains.
In Richmond it had tacitly maintained. Like most places it sucked to be black and be in the court system, or be driving in the wrong area after hours, whatever they were. Being accepted in the workplace usually involved just ignoring most of the day to day indignities that aren’t meant to be racially insensitive, but are. Normal. Same everywhere.
Now it isn’t.
You can’t murder a helpless black man and smirk to a national audience. Who knew?
I drove down to the monument today.
It was a Tuesday afternoon, and there was very little happening. Not many folks there. The monument stands in the middle of a large rotary, and scattered across the lawn that sets the monument apart from the road, giving it its grandeur, its intended deification, 40 -70 people surrounded the bronze symbol. They crawled upon it, photographed it, photographed their families with it. No graffiti was added to it today. There was no room left. Its entirety was engulfed with the rage of a hundred plus years since its erection. Some returning hate for hate. Some brutal. Some touching, some soaring. All inevitable. All revealed for all to see. So now what are you gonna do?
The monument was not the sight of protest today when I was there. There were neither protesters nor protectors of law and order. None of that dynamic was percolating while I was there. There was about a 60/40 split of people of color and white folks, and they all seemed on a pilgrimage. They had come to a place of worship, a solemn place where something of significance could be encapsulated. Candles burned with the names of African-American martyr’s names emblazoned on them. Placards surrounded the monument with victims names, pictures and stories of their undeserved sacrifice. People bent and read them, knew this had to stop. This had become a holy place. A place where we could all gather and either be liberated or atone, each to his or her own history.
Churches set up tables and provided free pizza or hamburgers to anyone that wanted some. Popsicles were offered. A saxophone player knew what to play. The way people interacted they seemed to tentatively recognize allies, little human solutions, or at least possibilities. I never felt like the “other” in my attraction to this place, my reasons for being there, for honoring this space. It was taken seriously, while understanding it was different, and that was ok.
People were bringing their children here, in spite of the colorful messaging that would require explanations for some of the younger ones. Old men and women came with canes to see this. To see what we were missing. They had been there before, and it was back, and they were still fighting. It was important to have seen this, to have some tangential way of connecting to it, to know where you stood and doing it publicly. I was there. I touched that, and it touched me.
One small graffiti offering touched me in particular. Can’t really say why, but it was so simple, so devoid of agenda, so basic.
I’m 15, I’m black and I’m proud.
I’m 62, I’m white and I’m not. But I’ll keep trying.