The paint-spattered monument to Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Richmond on June, 9, 2020. Protesters tore down the statue late the next day. John McDonnell/The Washington Post
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As the Trump administration seeks to restore public tributes to the Confederacy, some of this city's dismantled Confederate monuments are headed back to public display in a different way - as part of a Los Angeles museum exhibition highlighting the racism of Lost Cause symbols.
Richmond's Valentine museum and the city's Black History Museum & Cultural Center of Virginia said last week that they lent several parts of monuments to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles for a show in October, including a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis that protesters dragged off its pedestal in 2020.
In Los Angeles, the Richmond relics will join statues and images removed from several other places, including the Stonewall Jackson statue from Charlottesville and items from Baltimore, New Orleans and Raleigh, North Carolina.
The loan of the materials "reflects our dedication to truth-telling and historical accountability," BHMVA Executive Director Shakia Gullette Warren said in a statement, adding that the museum has "a commitment to ensure that objects once intended to glorify those who led the fight to enslave African Americans are repurposed in ways that foster critical reflection, healing, and deeper public understanding of America's past, present, and future."
Most Confederate memorials in the country were erected in the early part of the 20th century, around the 50th anniversary of the Civil War. By then, the Old South's defense of slavery had been supplanted in popular thought by the enduring creed of the Lost Cause. This version of history held that the insurrection had been a righteous uprising against federal tyranny and that the men who waged the rebellion should be revered for their patriotism and sacrifice.
Monument supporters today still espouse some or all of that view, while opponents note that the rise of Confederate statues largely coincided with the rise of a new white supremacism in the South under Jim Crow laws that excluded Black people from civic and economic life.
Following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020, racial justice protesters converged on several Confederate statues along Monument Avenue in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy.
Protesters eventually tore down the Davis monument, after which then-Mayor Levar Stoney ordered the removal of all other Confederate memorials on city property, some 15 in all. In 2021, Virginia took down a mammoth statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee from state-owned property and deeded the site and the statue to the city.
Richmond officials transferred ownership of most of the removed monuments to the BHMVA, which has since worked with consultants and the community to come up with an appropriate way to handle the artifacts. The monuments were carefully preserved, and most remain in secure storage at a city facility.
The articles lent to the Los Angeles museum include a globe from a monument to Confederate naval officer Matthew Fontaine Maury; the granite base of the Davis monument; a statue of Vindicatrix, an allegorical figure that stood atop a tall column as part of the Davis monument; and granite slabs from various other Confederate monuments.
The Davis statue itself - dented and spattered with protesters' paint - has been on display at the Valentine, a museum of Richmond history. It will remain there until Aug. 17, museum officials said, and then be packed and shipped to Los Angeles.
The upcoming exhibition, called "Monuments," is a collaboration between the Los Angeles museum and the Brick, an art gallery in the city. The decommissioned statues - some intact, some damaged and defaced - will be exhibited in galleries alongside recent works by contemporary artists.
The idea is to "illustrate the evolution of the Confederate monument from its roots in a funerary impulse to its rise as a crystalline symbol of a white supremacist ideology, whose obstinacy became increasingly conspicuous against calls for civil rights," according to the Los Angeles museum's description of the exhibition.
The Brick purchased the Stonewall Jackson statue from Charlottesville for $50,000 in 2021. Artist and exhibition co-curator Kara Walker will use it to create a new artwork, a spokeswoman for Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art said. Charlottesville's other controversial rebel statue - a towering Lee monument that was a focal point of the deadly Unite the Right rally in 2017 - was melted down.
The exhibition is scheduled for Oct. 23 through April 12 at the Brick and the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, after which the Richmond components will be returned to the city. The Los Angeles museum raised money from donors to cover the transportation costs.
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