By Pearse Riendeau
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was apprehended by police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and killed by police during his arrest. His story made national news, and the viral video of his death renewed focus on inequalities in the justice system. Black Lives Matter protests erupted around the nation, addressing police brutality and looking for justice for Floyd, as well as bringing attention to racism in the United States.
Richmond, due to its roots as the former capital of the Confederacy, became one of the earliest places to be affected by these protests, with many people quickly gathering together after Floyd’s killing to stand against these injustices. Monument Avenue, with its statues of Confederate heroes, was the epicenter of these protests.
All five Confederate statues on Monument Avenue were defaced and vandalized last summer, which ultimately led Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney to call for the immediate removal of the statues. The only statue left is that of General Robert E. Lee, located in a traffic circle at the intersection of Monument and North Allen Avenues in The Fan.
The Lee Monument. Photo credit: Pearse Riendeau
The Lee statue still stands because it sits on state-owned land, so the city of Richmond does not have the authority to remove it. Currently, there are legal challenges to a June 2020 order from Governor Ralph Northam (D) to remove the Lee statue. The other statues, however, were able to be removed because the Virginia legislature passed a bill, signed by Northam in April 2020, allowing individual cities and towns to remove Confederate statues without state approval.
During the protests last summer, many supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement even began setting up tents and living in the circle. Even after the removal of these statues, the protests still continued. Still, to this day people can be seen meeting in the roundabout where the Lee statue stands, which has been renamed by BLM activists as Marcus-David Peters Circle, after a man shot and killed by Richmond Police in 2018. The area has become a place for people to gather, with basketball hoops, concerts, markets, and other activities also taking place in the circle. The Lee statue was featured on the cover of a National Geographic magazine last month, with an image of Floyd’s face projected onto the base.
As a result of these gatherings, some residents of the surrounding Fan and Museum District neighborhoods have been affected because of the flood of people on Monument Avenue and surrounding streets.
VMI graduate and lifelong Richmonder Elliott Warren and Collegiate junior Max McManus (‘22) both live near the Robert E. Lee Memorial. I asked them to discuss their experiences living near the monuments this past year.
McManus, who lives close to the circle where the Lee monument stands, was able to experience firsthand almost everything that happened this summer. McManus described the first protests in late May and into early June, saying, “I saw the pictures and videos of what had happened the night before, and it was shocking.” He and his family were vacationing outside the city and drove back to Richmond the next day to check on their home. The next day, he recalls that “driving around the city was shocking. We saw many local businesses with the windows broken, and all the monuments had been defaced.”
During the first week of the protests, chants and music ensued throughout the day and into the night, which proved to be a disruption for McManus and many of his neighbors. McManus says that the protests remained peaceful until June 3, when police arrived at the scene and “threw tear gas into the crowds of protesters, driving them into one of the side streets near the Monument.” He was able to get a video of this moment.
Video credit: Max McManus
McManus believes that this was when the protests were at their worst, due to unprovoked police violence, and he said that “after that, every single day since then, for around a month, there were people at the Monument, and then it became a place where people placed tents and stayed there in support of the movement.”
During this time, McManus says, “my parents did not want me going out past nine,” because of all the people who were right outside of his house. Now, McManus says that “it is much calmer now on an average day than it was over the summer.” As for property damage, the only thing McManus recalls happening to his house was when “‘Black Trans Lives Matter’ was written in crayon on one of my seat cushions on our front porch.”
28-year-old Elliott Warren, a senior portfolio advisor with Merrill Lynch, lives on Arthur Ashe Boulevard, which intersects Monument Avenue, and over the summer he too witnessed the protests. Looking back, Warren recalls that on June 3, “at least a thousand people marched down my street, and cars were driving down the wrong side of the road.” He and his friends would watch everything unfold in the streets from his balcony. He also managed to capture a video of the situation.
Video credit: Elliott Warren.
Warren recalls similar demonstrations almost every night for about six weeks, each “lasting for around an hour or so.” When recalling the events that unfolded, Warren talked about not only the protests but also describes the vandalism endured by his neighborhood. The iron railings leading up to his neighbor’s front door were ripped from the ground and thrown through a neighbor’s windshield. Additionally, at one point a protester with a sledgehammer was breaking bricks off of Warren’s property and handing them to people to use as projectiles.
Although this vandalism happened, Warren said that “the vast majority of the nights, the protests remained peaceful in front of our house.”
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