Richmond’s Statues of Limitation
A legal battle to block the removal of the city’s most iconic Confederate memorial shows how stubborn the past can be
At the root of any organism lives everything healthy and ill within it. Richmond, Virginia, is not simply an American city. Richmond is an American root. It shines with a municipal beauty that balances sleek modern design and breathtaking 19th-century architecture with wondrous foliage and landscaping. In its shadows lives the ugly of Richmond: its history as the capital of the Confederacy. Last week, within the first hour of my most recent visit to the city, I realized that encountering Richmond’s charms unattached to its historic racism is nearly impossible.
I rode into Byrd Park and passed Shields Lake, a seven-acre man-made pool where for years white locals swam leisurely until integration in the 1950s led to a ban on swimming. Byrd Park sits at the southern end of Arthur Ashe Boulevard. It also features several tennis courts on which Ashe, as a child growing up in Richmond, wasn’t allowed to play. On the east side of the park is an area once known as “the Devil’s half-acre” because slave auctions were held there and one of the cruelest slave jails in the Colonies stood there. It is now home to the Main Street railroad station, a farmers market, and a parking lot…
