Reenvisioning Richmond's Past: Race, Reconciliation, and Public History in the Modern South, 1990-Present

RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, IS MORE THAN THE FORMER CONFEDERATE capital: it is a city seeking to end its complicity with American racism. Nothing encapsulates Richmond's desire for an inclusive multiracial identity better than the movement to withdraw Confederate monuments from the southern landscape. After national tragedies in Charleston, South Carolina (2015), and Charlottesville, Virginia (2017), southern cities both large and small removed statues that honored Confederate heroes.1 Richmond half-heartedly joined this movement in the summer of 2017, when Mayor Levar M. Stoney's ad hoc commission considered the removal of the Jefferson Davis statue, along with the reinterpretation of other Confederate relics, on the city's famous Monument Avenue. Yet, as statues came down in New Orleans, Baltimore, Austin, Texas, and Durham, North Carolina, by the fall of 2017 Richmonders had not reinterpreted