Visited Richmond Virginia on a hot humid
day. It was a major slave market
and the capital for the breakaway Confederacy. The city has a pronounced Civil War iconography. Along
Monument Avenue there are imposing statues of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and
Stonewall Jackson. It is all honor and romanticized resistance; no sense of
slavery. But at the far end of the Avenue, looking away from Davis, there is a
more recent monument to the African American tennis star Arthur Ashe.
The dissonance continues in the
Virginia Historical Society. After passing through huge paintings depicting Lee
and his officers as bearded heroes looking resolutely onto a battle scene, the contemporary
exhibition on Virginia's history takes an unflinching look at the race, class
and gendered nature of the state’s evolution. While some rooms celebrate the white romanticized
South, others deconstruct its racial, class and gender bias.
Richmond's urban landscape and institutional
memory embodies the history of the South but also the complex and evolving and
conflicting ways of understanding and dealing with this past.
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| Monument to Jefferson Davis (©John Rennie Short) |
