A monument commission in Richmond, Va., recommended removal of confederate leader Jefferson Davis’s statue from the city’s Monument Avenue on Monday.
“A holistic narrative acknowledges the emotional realities the Monument Avenue statues represent as well as other assets within the City,” the report states. The commissioners also noted that the Davis statue is, out of all the statues, “most unabashedly Lost Cause in its design and sentiment.”
Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney’s Monument Avenue Commission issued a 117-page report that lays out a plan to replace the Davis statue with another monument, depending on resolution of some legal issues, as well as a change in state law. The 10-person commission, created a year ago, also recommended adding signage to four other statues that “reflects the historic, biographical, artistic and changing meaning over time.”
Two years ago, the statue was vandalized with the words “Black Lives Matter,” which the city said it would pay a contractor to remove, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
In Charlottesville last August, a violent clash broke out between white nationalists and counterprotesters over a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, and the statue was later covered with a tarp. This occurred after the city had voted to remove the statue of Lee several months before, to which a group of protesters, including the Virginia Division of Sons of Confederate Veterans, responded by suing the city.
This past February, a Virginia judge ordered the tarps covering the statues of Lee and Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson to be removed, and in April, the Charlottesville Daily Progress reported that two separate trials regarding the monuments are slated for Oct. 26 and Jan. 31.
