A display along the floodwall in the late ’90s resulted in fire and ire
After months of controversy, Robert E. Lee’s image on the floodwall was set ablaze in the early morning hours of Jan. 17, 2000. (Photo by Don Long courtesy Richmond Times-Dispatch)
A figure of Robert E. Lee causes controversy and raises demands for its removal. City Council is caught in a storm of public frustration that brings unwanted national attention. This is not Richmond’s summer of 2020 but a preview from June 1999 that lasted into the new year and beyond.
The cultural tempest didn’t involve statuary but instead a billboard-sized image of Lee. The banner joined 28 others suspended along the recently completed floodwall guarding downtown and Shockoe Bottom against the seasonal inundations of the James River. The gallery ran about 400 feet from the Turning Basin at 14th Street to where the canal passes through the floodwall at 17th Street.
The designers promoted a big-picture vision. An explanatory panel asserted that the depictions of people, places and events provided “images of history” that “shape, provoke and inspire us.”
The words proved truer than likely expected by anyone in the Richmond Historic Riverfront Foundation, which paid for the outdoor gallery; the Richmond Riverfront Development Corp. overseeing the $40 million Canal Walk project; or the New York museum-installation firm of Ralph Appelbaum Associates, which created the display for the Canal Walk’s formal opening on June 4, 1999.
The banners depicted 13 themes, among them war, founders, floods and notable individuals, including William Byrd II, Maggie Walker, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Chief Powhatan — and Lee.
The only fireworks expected for the weekend of festivities were those scheduled for Sunday evening on Brown’s Island.
But on the morning of June 2, the front page of the Richmond Times-Dispatch published a picture of workers installing banners in the gallery’s “War” section, which included Lee wearing his Confederate general’s uniform with ceremonial sash and sword. Lee was flanked by Chief Powhatan, leader of the Powhatan Tribe when the Europeans arrived in 1607 in what they named Virginia, and Gabriel Prosser, whose August 1800 slave revolt fell apart due to betrayal and storms, ending with Prosser’s execution not far from the site.
Lightning-rod City Councilman Sa’ad El-Amin told the Richmond Free Press that he looked at the Times-Dispatch “and I saw Robert E. Lee’s face on the wall and went to meet with [Richmond Riverfront Development Corp. Executive Director] Jim McCarthy around 12 o’clock.” During the afternoon, he joined in discussions with James E. Rogers, president of the Richmond Historic Riverfront Foundation, and Brenton S. Halsey, president of the RRDC’s board of directors.
El-Amin declared that displaying Lee’s image in Richmond, a city with a population that was then 55% Black, was tantamount to hanging Adolf Hitler’s portrait in Berlin or Israel. “He is offensive to the African-American community because of what he stood for,” which included slavery, El-Amin told the Free Press. The councilman asserted that he would be enslaved himself if Lee had won the war.
If Lee stayed up, El-Amin stated, “We’ll jam.” He meant protests and a boycott of the Canal Walk.
The Richmond Historic Riverfront Foundation fielded phone calls complaining about the Lee banner. The general came down.
El-Amin, born in New York as JeRoyd Wiley Greene Jr. and a Yale Law School graduate, came to Richmond in 1969 as JeRoyd X. Greene. He served for a time as a litigator for the Nation of Islam, later converting and changing his name to Sa’ad El-Amin. He won his Sixth District council seat in 1998 and leveraged that position for outspoken challenges to how Richmond ran or, as he viewed the situation, how it didn’t.
El-Amin told the Times-Dispatch that he appreciated the sensitivity of Canal Walk officials, and that he knew some people would be angered that Lee’s image was removed. All involved remembered the tumult of three years earlier surrounding the installation of the Arthur Ashe Jr. statue on Monument Avenue.
El-Amin declared that displaying Lee’s image in Richmond, a city with a population that was then 55% Black, was tantamount to hanging Adolf Hitler’s portrait in Berlin or Israel.
Anger soon came from the Heritage Defense Committee of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Nelson D. Rodgers of the Mechanicsville branch of the SCV told the Times-Dispatch he was gladdened to see Lee’s image. “I thought, by golly, things are turning around in this city. ... I was wrong.” He felt it absurd to remove the banner. “The whole issue is people’s heritage,” he said.
During the Canal Walk opening event, a boatload of dignitaries rode in a motorized launch down the expanded millrace christened the Haxall Canal. Among the passengers was L. Douglas Wilder, a former Virginia governor and future Richmond mayor. A contingent of the SCV draped the Confederate stars and bars over the 14th Street bridge under which the boat passed. Wilder, the first African American to be elected as governor in the U.S., stood, smiled and saluted. He later explained to The Washington Post that he intended to defuse tensions.
Soon thereafter, the Richmond Historic Riverfront Foundation and Richmond Renaissance, a downtown booster group, convened a panel to meditate on the question of who should go on the wall, including Lee. After gathering public input on a revamped display, entertainer and philanthropist Bill Robinson was removed, and other Black figures were added, including the crusading Richmond Planet editor John Mitchell Jr.; Medal of Honor winner Powhatan Beaty, a first sergeant in the Union Army; and U.S. Appeals Court Judge Spottswood Robinson III. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, who also happened to be a slave owner, made the new display, along with Richmond-born, internationally known sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel, who as a cadet at the Virginia Military Institute fought for the Confederacy, and Abraham Lincoln, who made a personal visit to smoldering Richmond after Confederates set fire to the city and fled in April 1865.
A replacement portrait of Lee was also included. The famous Mathew Brady picture showed a hatless Lee standing in uniform on a back porch in front of a cross-and-Bible door.
The committee referred their choices to City Council. El-Amin sought to leave the wall bare rather than return Lee, whatever he wore.
And then on July 16, former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke made a cameo appearance beneath the Arthur Ashe statue. “Duke warned that the Lee controversy was just one battle in a war over the heritage of ‘European Americans,’ ” reported The Washington Post. Duke professed confusion about the Ashe statue on an avenue for “heroes of the Confederacy. … But they can’t put up with a mural of Robert E. Lee.”
At last came the final decision by City Council. After an exhausting four-hour meeting in late July, the donnybrook was bridged by a 6-3 vote to approve the banners, with Lee among them. That November, a Times-Dispatch headline quipped, “Lee likeness returns to wall without a shot fired.”
Then, between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. on Jan. 17, 2000, someone tossed a Molotov cocktail at the Lee banner, burning the image off the vinyl mesh. Lee didn’t return.
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