The American Monument in 2020

What should we do with unwanted American monuments? Our answer will hinge on the social and historical contexts surrounding the monument and on the ideological stances of those involved in the debate – who doesn’t want them, who does, and why? 

In the summer of 2020, this question became unavoidable as millions of Americans called for the removal, destruction, recontextualization, or preservation of Confederate and colonial monuments across the United States.¹ In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, the onslaught of a global pandemic, and the ongoing history of American racism, colonialism, and exclusionary practice, towering monuments to American exceptionalism became stand-ins for a raging national debate about who we are and who we ought to be. Monument modification became an art form, a way to voice opinions not only about the relevant monument but about American society and culture at large. As is true for any artistic pursuit, the nuances and differences in views about how to answer our original question can be read from the materials, methods, location, and authorship of each piece. We can read the spirit of the moment from the statues that were toppled, reframed, or removed.  

The dilemma of American monuments was and is incredibly controversial, and only a small range of opinions will be explored throughout this article. In asking what was done with unwanted monuments, we explore only the actions of those who didn’t want them, and of those who were bold enough or powerful enough to take action at all. Those individuals undeniably come from a similar political and ideological position. Yet, as we will see, the range of views held within that limited community is not so narrow – it is those distinctions between similar viewpoints which will dominate the coming discussion.  

Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia was the focal point of the 2020 monument debate. The street boasted a collection of five Confederate monuments – to J.E.B. Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and Robert E. Lee. All but the last were removed, either by protestors or by the city, by the end of 2020.² However, it is the Robert E. Lee Monument which garnered the most national attention.  

The Lee Monument stands six stories tall, topped by an equestrian bronze of Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate States Army. Its plinth is immense – wide steps lead to four granite pillars and a plaque inscribed with the general’s name and life dates. The 40-foot base leads the eye to the bronze statue, depicting a calm Lee on his horse, Traveller, his gaze landing high over the head of any onlooker.³ 

After the murder of George Floyd on May 25^th, 2020, the monument began a transformation from this altar to the Confederate Lost Cause, from a tribute to historic anti-Black racism and nostalgia for Black enslavement, to a testament to and celebration of Black strength and beauty. Colorful graffiti crawled up the plinth, establishing a narrative between the monument and Black Lives Matter language and iconography. The words were written on top of one another in layers – the decorative aspect and the scale of the undertaking were more important than the meaning of individual phrases. Support for the BLM movement and its related causes began to swallow the monument and its message.⁴  

On June 2^nd, Dustin Klein, a digital artist, began to project the faces and words of Black leaders, as well as those of the victims of race-based violence, onto the monument. Videos of Malcolm X speaking and Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech, images of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, a pride flag, a bail fund phone number, Black Union soldiers, W.E.B. DuBois, and victims of police violence like George Floyd occupied the side of the monument throughout the summer.⁵ On June 26^th, Richmond police attempted to vacate the park with tear gas on orders from the state – Klein hid, keeping Harriet Tubman’s face and the words, “Slavery is the next thing to hell,” steadily on the monument.⁶  

Lee Circle became a community gathering space. The space was renamed Marcus-David Peters Circle by protestors in June to memorialize Marcus-David Peters, a Black man killed by police during a mental health crisis in 2018.⁷ Richmond residents set up voter registration booths, memorial placards to victims of police and state violence, a vigil and concert by rapper Trey Songz, a wedding, performances, food vendors – anything that one can do with others happened in the shadow of the monument.⁸ One image of two Black teenagers, dressed for ballet and balancing on pointe shoes on the steps of the monument, fists raised, went viral. The Elegba Folklore Society, a Black dance collective, hosted a drum circle and African dance events for the public.⁹ The Richmond community chose to reclaim and recontextualize this monument, even as the other four Confederate monuments on Monument Avenue were toppled or removed.¹⁰  

For many, the Lee Monument answered the question of what should be done with Confederate, colonial, and otherwise unjust memorializations of American history perfectly – in looking for the balance between destruction and preservation, many pointed here. The monument memorialized the BLM protests, the language and graphics of the movement emblazoned onto its granite. It educated the world about ongoing systemic racism and Black history through Klein’s projections. It was the ultimate reclamation of space, of history, of narrative – to celebrate Blackness specifically in front of a Confederate monument was powerful. And it did this all without eradicating the monument or its history. But the work’s generalizability to the other 780 extant Confederate monuments in the United States, its feasibility in a less socially tense climate, and the long-term message which leaving Confederate statues standing sends are all points of concern.¹¹ The Lee Monument still stands as a reminder of some Americans’ reverence for Robert E. Lee – its presence is not obviously beneficial, even after the monument was reframed and reclaimed. It was perhaps for these reasons that many protestors across the United States took alternative approaches to monument modification, each existing on a sliding scale of antagonism, privacy, and radicalism.   

Elsewhere in Richmond, a Christopher Columbus monument had a very different fate. On June 9^th, protestors gathered in Byrd Park to hear from Indigenous leaders standing in solidarity with the BLM movement.¹² After the organized event, protestors returned to the monument. They marked it with blood-like paint and declarations of Black and Indigenous power, set it on fire, toppled it with ropes and dragged it into nearby Fountain Lake. A cardboard sign on the empty plinth read, “Columbus represents genocide.” Images projected onto the space asserted “This is Powhatan land” and “BLM.” A poster next to the sunken monument declared, “You will not be missed,” below a cartoon gravestone, commemorating the death of racism.¹³  

The message of the Statue of Christopher Columbus was fierce and didactic – get rid of the colonial monuments, the Confederate monuments, the monuments to an inaccurate and harmful yet widely embraced American history. This work gives nothing to the opposing view, it makes no effort to preserve a history or culture which has white supremacy as a founding tenet, literally drowning that narrative. By leading the destruction of the monument, those whose cultures were attacked both by Columbus and the ideals he stands for recreate the self-determination that he stole.   

For some, this lack of negotiation was detrimental to the message of the protest. Some Italian Americans, for instance, see Columbus as a founding father of Italian Americanism, as a figure whose notoriety aided in Italian social ascension and escape from discrimination in the U.S. The monument was in fact gifted to the city in 1927 by the Italian American community.¹⁴ To others, the antagonism embodied here was absolutely necessary, and anything less would be dangerously pacifist – devotion to anti-racism means totally disallowing the inclusion of Confederate veneration in the American narrative.  

This more radical stance can be seen clearly in the materials of New York City-based social movement Decolonize This Place, a self-described “action-oriented movement” working for “Indigenous struggle, Black liberation, free Palestine, workers, degentrification, dismantle patriarchy.”¹⁵ In 2020, the movement assisted in community organization and mobilization in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, providing protestors and community activists with a visual and written language of dissent. Most widespread was their poster How To Take Down A Monument, a practical guide to monument destabilization that was censored by Instagram within 24 hours of being posted for “coordinating harm or promoting crime.”¹⁶ The poster provides detailed instruction on the technique of monument removal: “It’s all about physics and cooperation!”¹⁷ The graphic’s proliferation is unquantifiable due to the infinite chain of shares and reshares marking its history. However, Decolonize This Place boasts 186,000 followers on Instagram – the extensive spread of this graphic is indubitable.¹⁸   

Posters like this one were a key mode of communication throughout 2020, and demonstrate the common iconography utilized by protestors. Its bright background yet simple imagery, dry humor, and straightforward wording make it conducive to quick proliferation over social media. The poster emphasizes personal safety, recommending gloves to avoid rope burn, an ironic comment next to its call for the toppling of massive stone objects. “Racist monument” is scrawled in slanted cursive across a fictional monument, humorous for those who agree with the designation, antagonistic for those who do not. It’s funny, it’s straightforward, it’s practical – it doesn’t try to convince. This was the attitude taken by many in their approach to monument destruction – no discussion or negotiation necessary, let’s tear them down.  

Outside of Richmond, institutions were met with enormous social pressure to make decisions regarding the fates of pieces deemed inaccurate, harmful, or offensive. In New York City, the American Museum of Natural History requested the removal of its equestrian bronze of Theodore Roosevelt in June.¹⁹ The monument depicts a fearless Roosevelt riding a horse and gazing straight ahead, an Indigenous man and a Black man trailing behind him, gazes pointed down, walking on foot. The Museum cited the hierarchical nature of the piece as the reason for its removal, reinforcing its support for Roosevelt by rededicating its Hall of Biodiversity to the former president. In doing so, the Museum not only avoided engaging with the history glorified by the monument, but explicitly denied any necessity of removal ensured by that context. The monument is problematic due to the way that it looks, not because of its content. The piece’s removal came after years of complaints regarding it, opponents pointing both to the work’s composition and Roosevelt’s belief in racial hierarchy, eugenics, and his imperialist agenda in the Caribbean and Latin America.  

In San Francisco, the Asian Art Museum decided to move a bust of patron Avery Brundage, previously featured in the museum’s entryway, to a less conspicuous location with added information to contextualize the work.²⁰ Brundage was the president of the International Olympics Committee from 1952-72 and is known for holding racist and anti-Semitic views. The announcement came after activists questioned the Museum’s integrity, pointing to the dichotomy between issued statements in support of the BLM movement and the presence of the bust.  

In Philadelphia, a statue of former mayor and police commissioner Frank Rizzo was removed from its spot outside the Municipal Affairs Building in the early hours of June 3^rd after BLM protestors attempted to topple it and splattered red paint onto it. A sign next to the empty plinth read “Stop killing my family,” and “FTP” was spray painted beside it.²¹ The statue was seen by many as a mark of an unjust past, a symbol of an old Philadelphia which remained unaddressed – though Rizzo’s tough-on-crime policies forced clear harm on Black and queer communities, the city had yet to come to terms with, let alone begin to repair, those actions, as exemplified by the statue’s continued presence.   

These three removals represent one type of institutional and municipal response to monument reevaluation. In all three cases, monuments were removed discreetly yet only after public outcry. We see little of the catharsis or empowerment expressed by protestor action, only a recognition of harm and an attempt to ameliorate it. Each institution weighed the importance of removing these figures from the American narrative, of allowing society to “move on” and move past these men, against the right of Black and Indigenous communities to deal with the monuments themselves, to reclaim or transform representations of those who shaped their histories, even if for the worse. Though the Asian Art Museum chose to add linguistic contextualization to the bust, and though Philadelphia eventually commissioned a mural to occupy the space that Rizzo once had,²² all three of these institutions elected to preserve the monuments in their original artistic form and to largely remove them from the public eye, placing an emphasis on discarding the past over redefining it. Even “discard” is a generous term, as each monument removal is fully reversible. The monuments were not destroyed or altered, only stowed away. The past was more hidden than it was defeated. 

Two local museums embraced artistic reclamation of Confederate monuments in a way more similar to protestor artworks than to the above institutional practices – they chose reclamation over removal. The Houston Museum of African American Culture (HMAAC) took possession of the Spirit of the Confederacy bronze statue after it was toppled by protestors in Sam Houston park, making it the only Confederate monument relocated to an African American organization so far.²³ The monument embodies the philosophy of the Confederacy, erected in 1908 by the Daughters of the Confederacy and dedicated “to all heroes of the South who fought for the Principles of States Rights.”²⁴ The monument is displayed outside of the museum, surrounded by a group of sculpted eyeballs by Houston local Bert Long Jr. The museum CEO, John Guess, explained: “Those eyes reflect Black Americans, eyes of color that are constantly looking at it.” In defense of the acquisition, Guess said that “healing comes from taking control of negatively impactful symbols and turning them into teaching opportunities to help ensure they never have power again.”²⁵  

The Valentine Museum in Richmond has requested ownership of the Jefferson Davis Monument, honoring the former president of the Confederate States of America, previously located on Monument Avenue.²⁶ The monument was toppled in June 2020 during the protests following George Floyd’s murder – it has been stored by the state ever since. The Museum wants to display the monument in its toppled state – covered in paint and dents and on its side – in an exhibit about its creator, Edward V. Valentine, whose family name is on the building. The exhibit would contain several of Valentine’s works, all of which helped to establish the iconography of the Confederacy, alongside historical information about Valentine’s relationship to the museum and Richmond’s involvement in the Confederacy.  

 Both of these institutional acts of monument modification are in conversation with the art produced by protestors, both directly in their preservation of monument destruction and indirectly in their use of contemporary artwork as contextualization. The HMAAC and Valentine Museum saw educational and creative potential in the remains of Confederate monuments – potential that could be unlocked only through a thorough degradation of the monuments’ power through recontextualization, reclamation, and novel synthesis. That extreme denial of power imposed upon the monuments is on par with the destructive forces which tore the Columbus Monument, and countless others, to the ground, and which Decolonize This Place repeatedly endorsed. On the other hand, the celebration of Black and Indigenous culture and power promoted by challenging the monuments with contemporary art and empowering the stories of those subjugated by the ideals the monuments represent speaks clearly to the victorious attitude present in Lee Circle. And, though still cultural institutions, both museums have deep roots in the cultures which the monuments attack, unlike the American Museum of Natural History, the Asian Art Museum, and the Philadelphia government.  

The fates of many extant monuments are still being debated, as are local and federal plans for future commissions. An analytic understanding of what was done in 2020, of the communicated interests of the people, is of indispensable value in these discussions. We have avoided evaluations of the efficacy of each piece discussed above – this must be left to reader discretion and to future research. But a catalog of what exactly happened in 2020, who did it, and what their motives were is a necessary first step for later debate regarding American monuments. It is this project, that of understanding, that we have begun above.  

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Footnotes:

[1] “How Statues Are Falling Around the World,” New York Times, June 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/us/confederate-statues-photos.html.

[2] . Michael Levenson, “Protesters Topple Statue of Jefferson Davis on Richmond’s Monument Avenue,” New York Times, June 10, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/11/us/Jefferson-Davis-Statue-Richmond.html.

[3]  Monument Avenue Commission, August 9, 2017, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/597a220f579fb3cca0ab3454/t/59ba83c47eff41a09686fd60/1505395655892/MAC+Program+August+9.pdf.

[4] Ezra Marcus, “Will the Last Confederate Statue Standing Turn Off the Lights?,” New York Times, June 23, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/style/statue-richmond-lee.html.

[5] Sabrina Moreno, “Projections at Lee Monument offer peace in times of violence,” Washington Post, July 5, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/projections-at-lee-monument-offer-peace-in-times-of-violence/2020/07/05/477f79c4-bec8-11ea-8908-68a2b9eae9e0_story.html

[6] ibid

[7] WWBT, “NYT names Lee statue most influential American protest art,” NBC29, last modified October 15, 2020.

[8] Ezra Marcus, “Will the Last Confederate Statue Standing Turn Off the Lights?,” New York Times, June 23, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/style/statue-richmond-lee.html.

[9] Rebecca J. Ritzel, “In Richmond, Black Dance Claims a Space Near Robert E. Lee,” New York Times, August 6, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/arts/dance/richmond-virginia-lee-monument.html.

[10] “Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy,” Southern Poverty Law Center, last modified February 1, 2019, https://www.splcenter.org/20190201/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy.

[11] “Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy,” Southern Poverty Law Center, last modified February 1, 2019, https://www.splcenter.org/20190201/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy.

[12] Zach Joachim, “Columbus statue removed from lake Wednesday after it was torn down at Byrd Park late Tuesday,” Richmond Times Dispatch, June 9, 2020, https://richmond.com/news/local/columbus-statue-removed-from-lake-wednesday-after-it-was-torn-down-at-byrd-park-late/article_8a009c9c-1c5d-5e2a-a3bf-0b015a8a2277.html.

[13] ibid

[14] ibid

[15] “Decolonize This Place,” Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/decolonizethisplace/?hl=en.

[16] “So much goes on @instagram that is violent but this informational poster, HOW TO TAKE DOWN A MONUMENT, below to the right is the one that triggers censorship, with our appeal already denied. 👇🏽 #igcomplicity #decolonizethisplace,” Twitter, June 17, 2020, https://twitter.com/decolonize_this/status/1273244601437036549.

[17]   Decolonize This Place, “Operation Manual,” Decolonize This Place

[18] “Decolonize This Place,” Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/decolonizethisplace/?hl=en.

[19]   Robin Pogrebin, “Roosevelt Statue to Be Removed From Museum of Natural History,” New York Times, June 21, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/arts/design/roosevelt-statue-to-be-removed-from-museum-of-natural-history.html.

[20]   Carol Pogash, “Asian Art Museum to Remove Bust of Patron. That’s Just a Start,” New York Times, June 15, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/arts/design/avery-brundage-bust-asian-art-museum.html.

[21]  “Protesters Vandalizing, Trying To Set Fire To Frank Rizzo Statue,” CBS Philly, May 30, 2020, https://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2020/05/30/protesters-vandalizing-trying-to-set-fire-to-frank-rizzo-statue/.

[22] “CROWN,” Mural Arts Philadelphia, https://www.muralarts.org/artworks/crown/.

[23]   Valentina Di Liscia, “At This Museum of African American Culture, Displaying a Confederate Statue Is a ‘Part of Healing,'” Hyperallergic, last modified August 2020, https://hyperallergic.com/583649/houston-museum-of-african-american-culture/.

[24]  “Spirit of the Confederacy,” Houston Parks and Recreation Department.

[25]   Valentina Di Liscia, “At This Museum of African American Culture, Displaying a Confederate Statue Is a ‘Part of Healing,'” Hyperallergic, last modified August 2020, https://hyperallergic.com/583649/houston-museum-of-african-american-culture/.

[26]   Valentina Di Liscia, “A Museum Once Led By a Major Confederate Sculptor Wants to Display a Defaced Jefferson Davis Monument,” Hyperallergic, January 5, 2021, https://hyperallergic.com/612864/a-museum-once-led-by-a-major-confederate-sculptor-wants-to-display-a-defaced-jefferson-davis-monument/.