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In 2016, Crystal went to Germany on a tour with the Greater Richmond Children's Choir, for which she then served as associate director. They started in Berlin, where they had opportunity to tour the Berlin Wall Memorial. She found it to be a moving and powerful experience. I later joined the tour in Dresden, where the rebuilt Frauenkirche serves as sobering reminder of some of our most destructive history. In Leipzig, we learned of that city's role in the fall of communism in central and eastern Europe. Crystal and I managed to enjoy a dinner outside a restaurant adjacent to St. Nicholas Church, where peaceful Monday Demonstrations from 1989 to 1991 played a significant role in the reunification of Germany. One thing I remember clearly is that the GRCC's tour host told us that everybody woke up on the day the Berlin Wall began to come down having no idea that it would happen that day. Critical mass had been achieved.

Or another image: my friend Donna shared a video of her daughter Grace attempting to discover how many rubber bands it takes to cut a watermelon in half. She stopped counting after five hundred. As the video shows, just one rubber band was all it took and then - pow.

I think of these often in Richmond, Virginia, in June 2020. For obvious reasons, the same critical mass, the same rubber band, the same last straw, has changed our city. Similar events are of course happening all over the country. The statues of confederate generals are a symbol of too much hate and too much pain and they are going to some repurposed use and it is certainly time. Oh there is some grumbling and fighting and worrying about property values, but they are going.

This painting is a study, done on the quick, just to see if my idea for the painting would work. As I noted in my previous blog entry, right now the monuments are bedazzled with graffiti and I find them eerily beautiful in this transformative state. This is an historic time, like those Monday demonstrations or the day people started hammering the Berlin Wall into rubble.

No-one knows what will replace these monuments. I have my own whimsical thought. Start at the intersection of Monument Avenue and  Arthur Ashe Boulevard and look east. There are statues in the grassy median. Life-sized, not on pedestals. Sadly, they are not together. One side of the median has slaves laboring at painful toil. The other side has their white owners, well dressed and prosperous. Moving east, we walk through time - the civil war - reconstruction - Jim Crow - Civil Rights.... sometimes the lines move closer together and maybe even commingle but there is still a here and a there. In the last block before what remains the Lee Monument we see BLM signs.

Inside the circle there is a beautiful fountain, and the statues of the people are no longer separated. They are together, in groups talking, playing games, dancing. In that final block between Lee and Stuart there is only an arrow, pointing to the future, because getting rid of the symbols will be only the beginning of monumental change.

What a week.

I woke up on May 31 to news that rioting in Richmond had worsened over a second night. It became personal upon realization that several very close friends lived in the very midst of some of the worst of it. Confederate statues on Monument Avenue were graffitied. The home of the Daughters of the Confederacy was also tagged and set on fire. Similar things happened across the country and kept happening all week with no signs of ending; although the initial vandalism and looting seem now to have been for the most part replaced by the late 1960s. The only thing missing is Ringo Starr walking around saying "Peace and Love."

One result, in Richmond, is that the ongoing discussion regarding the statues on Monument Avenue came to a decision point. They are going away. This is complicated, but not as complicated as I once thought. I still think that the Civil War is part of American history and must not be ignored, and for that reason I used to think that the statues should remain but be reinterpreted with the eyes of the 21st century. Then I listened to Governor Northam's speech addressing why the Robert E. Lee statue will come down. It boils down to the reality that it was constructed in 1890 not so much to honor a complex man as to be a component of deliberate efforts to deconstruct the Reconstruction and give rich white people a park to build fancy homes around. During the time it took for black people to construct the pedestal, transport the French built multi-ton bronze statue from the waterfront to the one time tobacco field, and somehow wrestle it to the top, other nefarious efforts reduced the number of registered African American voters in Virginia from over 100,000 to roughly 10,000. Thus the Robert E. Lee statue memorializes the official initiation of the Jim Crow era in Virginia at least as much if not more than the man himself. Not, to me, a reason to keep the thing around anymore. 

Monument Ave is often described as one of the prettiest streets in America. Block after block of magnificent homes with a broad grassy tree lined median and statues which aesthetically are works of art irrespective of who they depict.  The vandalism of the statues in one sense hurts. It is, logically, indefensible. All those F-words. From another perspective, however, I find the statues today curiously beautiful too. Somebody on Facebook shared photos, apparently taken early one morning before daily protestors showed up, of ballerinas dancing around the base of the Lee statue. I have no idea who this young lady is or who made the original Facebook post. I hope they do not mind my borrowing some images for this blog, and if they ask me to take them down I will. But they speak to me. Of history. Righteousness. Hope. A new day.

And what of the future? I don't know. Nobody does. Hopefully there will be new monuments. Hopefully there will be a conscientious effort to somehow somewhere preserve the statements made by all that spray paint on the pedestals, which is history in real time. I certainly hope the statues find a home somewhere other than a warehouse, where the artistry, if nothing else, can be seen. Monument Avenue will remain beautiful.

I acknowledge that this is just the optics. And should the results from the protests be limited to the simple rearrangement of a rich person street, it will be tragic. The real work is to restart - no, complete - our journey to the country Martin Luther King, Jr., dreamed of. But optics make for a great start, and the reimagining of Monument Avenue is a great start.

Let's go!