Lee as soon as possible. Northam had already signed legislation permitting Virginia cities to remove monuments on their own land. The law takes effect in just days, on July 1. One need travel only a couple of miles from Monument Avenue to find the Commonwealth Club, an exclusive social club that, for a century, was both all-white and all-male.
Harry F. Byrd Jr. Former Democratic Gov. Douglas Wilder, a Black man, humiliated the Commonwealth Club when he turned down the offer of membership it traditionally extends to the state governor shortly after his election in The remaking of Monument Avenue will be the culmination of those social gains. Richmond was the locus of the worst sin Americans have ever committed.
It was the capital of a treasonous regime founded on the idea that white people could and should own Black people because they believed white people were inherently superior. And the city celebrated that sin for more than a century. It was irredeemable. The irredeemable city is gone, and a new city is tearing down the shrines to an unforgivable past. But the New South was a middle-class society, powered by an emergent bourgeoisie.
The New South was no longer dominated exclusively by plantation owners who lorded over Black workers like medieval viscounts. But the emerging class of white professionals and capitalists were often just as racist and exploitative as their slave-owning ancestors. Lee statue. It was a celebration of a man who killed his own countrymen in defense of slavery. And it was a baptism, of sorts, for an American traitor. Like any good salesman, Grady targeted his pitch to his audience.
When he spoke in New York, he touted a kind of racial symbiosis between the kind of men who owned homes along Monument Avenue and the formerly enslaved. Grady offered a very different message for his Southern audience in Dallas the following year. In Richmond, these two messages were often woven together. It did not admit its first African American member until Someone traveling between the two clubs would pass St. For 95 years, elementary students at St. The school did not rename the societies until One of the more unlikely activists calling for the statues to come down on Monument Avenue is the Rev.
Robert W. Like many white men in the South, he grew up surrounded by Confederate iconography and immersed in a sanitized view of the past — a view he rejected as he trained for the ministry. We spoke about why white Richmonders continued to cling to these icons for well over a century after Rev.
They played on streets celebrating Confederate leaders, swam in a whites-only pool surrounded by an exquisitely manicured golf course. They graduated, secured jobs working for companies owned by the families that lived in the shadow of Confederate generals, and started to amass the kind of wealth that might allow them to buy their own homes on Monument Avenue someday. Overall, the cost of living in Richmond is 5 percent below the national average, and housing costs are 11 percent below the national average.
Urban centers with warm weather and a low cost of living are an attractive package for young professionals trying to figure out where to build their lives. A lot of Southern cities are attracting people who are moving from places like Connecticut, New York, and Ohio. Often they are surprised — and dismayed — to discover Confederate monuments dotting the view from their new homes. Additionally, the number of South Asians living in the American South almost tripled between and , with much of the growth occurring in Richmond.
One of them was Richmond. This changing culture creates a kind of virtuous circle that attracts even more left-leaning professionals. When she attended meetings with local tourism officials, she says, their presentations would often feature a slide noting how many people came to Richmond each year to see the Confederate monuments. But two can play at that game. Today, city officials not only have to weigh the cost of lost tourism dollars if they tear down the monuments but also consider whether Black tourists will be less likely to spend money in Richmond if they are confronted by an enormous statue of a Confederate general.
The avenue's foot-wide right-of-way contains a foot, tree-lined median in the center with adjacent foot-wide, two-lane streets and double-wide, foot sidewalks on each side. Interspersed at key cross streets are six memorials that pay tribute to the past Civil War General Robert E. Lee and four of his Confederate contemporaries and to the present black Richmond native, humanitarian, and tennis champion Arthur Ashe.
The avenue is replete with architecture from the late 19th and early 20th centuries including Colonial Revival, Craftsman, Classical Revival, Mediterranean, Romanesque, and Tudor Revival. Here is a place that motorists use everyday, but that each year attracts pedestrians, festival-goers, and others by the thousands.
A straight extension of downtown's Franklin Street, the avenue is on perfect lateral axis with the state capitol building designed by Thomas Jefferson and built in Entering Richmond from the west and greeted at Roseneath Street by the Ashe statue, the avenue provides a stunningly unified procession to the denouement of Capitol Square.
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