The Education of a White Richmonder — Chuck Hansen: humorist...

Daniel, Stacy and I returned to Monument Avenue a couple weeks ago to see the Confederate statues. We’d often walked past these statues, but we wanted to see them recontextualized, you might say, with spray-painted expressions of anger, sorrow and hope. Madison lives in the city and had already made the pilgrimage.

Since then, several of the statues have been removed, so I’m glad we went when we did.

Friends told me how moving it was to see the statues covered in messages and surrounded by tributes and flowers, so, I expected the scene would be impressive. But I was surprised and, honestly, embarrassed, by how profound the experience was.

Before I go into why I was embarrassed, I should address the white elephant in the room (me). Like many white Americans, I am sometimes reluctant to speak out on this issue. Do we really need another old white guy virtue signaling by whitesplaining the situation, and stealing oxygen from Black voices? However, some of my Black friends encouraged me. They told me they are tired and need allies to help advocate, so… the white elephant speaks.

I was raised in Richmond, have lived here 44 of my 57 years, and am relatively well-versed in our history. I know of oft-repeated justification that compromise was necessary regarding America’s original sin to secure the votes of the southern states, thus extending the misery of slavery for a significant percentage of the population. I knew of the South’s continued intransigence through the early 19th Century, and the inevitable national rupture foreseen by Jefferson.

I also knew that these monuments were part of the post-war Confederate propaganda campaign carried out by the Daughters of the Confederacy and other groups.

For example, the inscription on the pedestal of Jefferson Davis’s statue reads, in part: “When their cause was lost, with dignity he met defeat…” In fact, when the cause was lost, Confederate hero Jefferson Davis ordered his troops to burn Richmond to the ground, then he slunk out of town under the cover of darkness, disguised a woman, to avoid capture.

A delicious tidbit, but still just history. My entire life, I’d viewed the Confederacy, the issue of slavery and, by extension, these monuments, simply as a point of historical interest.

But, with the help of Black friends and through the passion of the protesters, over the past weeks I had begun to understand more empathetically what I had, until now, mostly thought about abstractly.

These statues were intended as a daily reminder to all Black Richmonders, on our city’s most celebrated street: “Your dead Emancipator can’t help you now. Our culture – which enslaved your ancestors and subjugated your ‘freed’ great-grandparents and terrorized your grandparents and discriminated against your parents – that culture is still honored and lives yet.”

Moving from abstraction to empathy suggested progress, but it wasn’t until that day, standing on the hot Monument Avenue pavement in front of the shrine to Jefferson Davis, that it really hit me.

The Jefferson Davis shrine, minus Jefferson Davis, who once glowered down on Black Richmonders from atop that pedestal

One of the inscriptions on the monument, erected some 60 years after the Confederacy’s “surrender” and maintained for the 100 years since, reads:

“The Army of the Confederate States, from Sumter to Appomattox, four years of unflinching struggle against overwhelming odds. Glory ineffable these, around their dear land wrapping, wrapt around themselves the purple mantle of death. Dying, they died not at all, but, from the grave and its shadow, valor invincible lifts them glorified ever on high.”

Now I viscerally comprehended the rage.

The spray-painted monuments have been compared to the graffiti-covered Berlin Wall. But I began to see that, for Black Americans, this might be a far more consequential event than the celebratory moment when the Wall fell.

Instead I was reminded of an event near the end of World War II, when the brutal Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was overthrown. He was arrested and executed and his body dumped in a square in Milan. There, the newly liberated Italians urinated and spat upon Mussolini’s corpse, then hung him by his feet with some of his highest-ranking disciples.

THIS is a long-delayed Mussolini moment of anger and payback for Black Americans. They have toppled their oppressor, Jefferson Davis and dumped his effigy into the middle of Monument Avenue, his face caved in and his body covered in epithets.

After more than 160 years, the descendants of those humans whom Jefferson Davis tried to keep enslaved finally were free enough to express the same rage that the Italians could in 1945, and that white Americans could in 1776.

This is history, happening right now. I highly recommend you go witness it, be a part of it. I can tell you it changed me.

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