From Confederate monuments to monumental memorial

my view

By GRAY BASNIGHT
Posted 8/26/20

For the second time in 155 years, President Abraham Lincoln would be pleased to see “right making might” in Richmond.

The first righteous triumph was a military victory on April 3, …

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From Confederate monuments to monumental memorial

my view

Posted

For the second time in 155 years, President Abraham Lincoln would be pleased to see “right making might” in Richmond.

The first righteous triumph was a military victory on April 3, 1865 when a fitting irony of American history took place. On that day, Black soldiers wearing Union blue were among the first to march into the still burning city. Abandoned just the previous day by Confederate troops and looted by whites, the capital of the bloody effort to preserve slavery was reduced to utter bedlam. With despondent, disbelieving white citizens looking on, those Black Yankees helped take peaceful occupation. They fought fires, cleared debris, restored order and stood guard in vital doorways of government and commerce.

The next day, Lincoln himself briefly toured the city for what may have been the most satisfying journey of his life because he knew the war would soon conclude. During his walk through the defeated city, he was recognized and mobbed by former slaves like a modern rock star. Ten short days later, he was assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer who could not conceive of Black men achieving citizenship in America.

Now, a century-and-a-half later, right is making might a second time in the former Confederate capital. Thanks to activists responding with justifiable fury at America’s systemic racism, real progress seems possible. In response to their demands, the equestrian statues of Thomas J. Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart have already been removed, and Virginia Governor Ralph Northam has ordered that the Robert E. Lee monument also be removed from its pedestal on Richmond’s grand Monument Avenue. Erected to mark Confederate pride and resistance to racial equality, the dismantling of these statues is an extraordinary victory over racist symbolism.

Consequently, now is the time to pose the question—what happens after all bronze relics celebrating the effort to destroy the United States to preserve slavery are removed? What monuments, if any, will grace Monument Avenue? The answer is obvious. The U.S. is long overdue to create a National Slave Memorial. A proposal for such a shrine has been languishing in Congress since 2003. Should federal legislators ever advance the effort, trending logic locates it on the National Mall in Washington.

That would be a lost opportunity of historic proportions.

Just as Germany’s Holocaust Memorial is in Berlin, so must America’s delinquent recognition of its own racist fanaticism be placed in the city that housed the government that waged the war to perpetuate the crime. The most appropriate site for the National Slave Memorial is not Washington, but the former capital of the Confederacy. And within that city, the single most appropriate location is this same one-and-a-half-mile median strip of parkland and grand public circles on Monument Avenue.

This chance to further reconstructive healing of America’s ugliest wound can happen only with tenacious commitment by federal, state and city legislators—and deep public support. If the challenge is seized, it must be pursued in a manner commensurate with its great purpose. Once constructed, the National Slave Memorial should allow visitors to experience history at an emotional level, as they now do by walking into, and out of, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Designers might even consider incorporating one or more of the Confederate statues, thereby subsuming their original purpose into a greater metaphor.

For anyone familiar with the consumptive harm of racial inequality, or who otherwise possess an honest grasp of American history, this would be a meaningful symbol of long-overdue reconciliation and apology.

Gray Basnight is a Richmond native who lives in New York City and proudly owns a home in Sullivan County, NY. His novel, Shadows in the Fire (Five Star/Cengage), centers on the final hours that Richmond served as the Confederate capital.

Robert E. Lee, Richmond, Confederacy

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