For as long as Richmond’s Jim Crow-era Confederate monuments existed, there have been calls for removal. During last week’s national protests against police brutality, those calls were answered when Virginia Governor Ralph Northam announced the impending removal of the Lee Monument, the most prominent, state-owned statue on Monument Avenue. Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney also committed to the removal of the remaining city-owned Confederate statues lining the avenue. In the meantime, citizens took matters into their own hands—tearing down two Confederate statues as well as a Christopher Columbus statue. How did the monuments to the Lost Cause come to be and how did politicians and public opinion shift towards supporting their removal?
This week on Full Disclosure Live, host Roben Farzad will talk with Adam Serwer, staff writer at The Atlantic who penned The Myth of the Kindly General Lee, and Dr. Julian Hayter, a historian at the University of Richmond and author of The Dream is Lost: Voting Rights and the Politics of Race in Richmond, Virginia.
Listen live Friday at 2 pm on 88.9 FM and call with your questions and thoughts on Richmond's confederate monuments at (804) 999-4 VPM. The show reairs Saturday at 6 PM and Sundays at 8 PM and is available wherever you get your podcasts.
