A group of property owners along Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, are challenging Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam’s executive decision to remove the Robert E. Lee statue after weeks of unrest.
Six homeowners filed a lawsuit on Monday that seeks to stop Northam’s administration from removing the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Protesters angered by the death of George Floyd in police custody have made Monument Avenue their battleground, defacing the monuments of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate Gens. Jeb Stuart and Stonewall Jackson.
The lawsuit claims the thoroughfare would lose its National Historic Landmark designation, and property owners argued they would suffer “the loss of favorable tax treatment and reduction in property values.” The suit also says that removing the monument would represent “the loss of a priceless work of art from their neighborhood and the degradation of the internationally recognized avenue on which they reside.”
On June 4, Northam announced his executive decision to remove the monument amid widespread protests against police brutality and systemic racism that became violent and destructive in some cases. A 10-day injunction was granted days later, which temporarily blocks the state from removing the Lee statue, after William Gregory, the great-grandson of the couple who signed over the land to the state, filed a suit last week arguing that Northam did not have the power to remove the monument.
96-year-old Helen Marie Taylor, a longtime Monument Avenue resident who laid down before bulldozers when the city threatened to tear up the street’s cobblestone design, was the only plaintiff named in the Monday filing. She told the Washington Post last week that rioters who defaced the monuments were “snakes,” “scoundrels,” and “graffiti goons.”
The lawsuit says that she has been “harassed by protesters at and in front of her residence on Monument Avenue, causing the other plaintiffs to be concerned about their personal safety and the safety of their families and residences.”
Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring wrote in the state’s filing that “symbols matter” and that the “Virginia of today can no longer honor a racist system that enslaved millions of people.”
