- [Reporter] Today is going to be a hot humid one.

In fact, that is the theme over the next several days.

- [Reporter] The former capital of the Confederacy is home to Monument Avenue, a long stretch with towering statues dedicated to figures like Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee.

- [Reporter] In the throws of a pandemic, the state is confronting another virus of sorts - institutionalized racism.

- [Activist] Another Black man died in police custody.

His name is George Floyd.

There's video of him pleading with an officer who's on his neck.

We hear him crying out, "I can't breathe."

(tense music) - This moment, this moment of solidarity in the global movement of Black lives and Black liberation.

So let us walk together, children, let us walk.

- On the block!

- Into the streets!

- On the block!

- Into the streets!

- On the block!

- Into the streets!

- Don't shoot!

- Hands up!

- Don't shoot!

- Hands up!

- What do we want?

- Justice!

- When do we want it?

- Now!

- Black lives matter!

- Black lives matter!

- Free the people!

- Free the people!

- Fight the power!

- Fight the power!

(crowd screaming) - [Activist] Look at what you're protecting, you cowards!

- The monuments have been here all of my life, all of my father's life, my grandmother's life.

And the idea that we are now awake to something different gives me a sense of hope, even though it has been hundreds of years in the making, that change - change is afoot.

(contemplative music) - Virginia has more monuments to the Confederacy than any state in the South.

And Monument Avenue is ground zero for not just the Confederacy, but the memory of the Confederacy after the end of the Civil War.

- They were intended to salve the ego of a defeated, wannabe nation.

They were designed to change the narrative because you can't feel but so heroic if you are fighting to keep people in chains.

(tense music) - Virginians started arguing about how to remember the war as it was going on.

A history of the war was being crafted, even when the outcome was as of yet unknown.

And we can think about elements of the Lost Cause, a constitutional right to secede, about slavery as inherently good and beneficial to African Americans, to brave and honorable soldiers.

All of those elements were already at play even before the war was over.

(tense music) - People started to debate how the war would be remembered, and particularly among Southerners.

They are having to grapple with crushing defeat.

They are having to grapple with a social order that has been upended.

Then you're talking about how African Americans wanted to remember.

A big part of that was about agency and never forgetting the indignities and the brutality of the slave system.

It is a tumultuous period.

- Richmond is one of the few industrialized centers in the South.

A lot of the reason why it was the capital of the Confederacy - it's not just because of its proximity to Washington, It's because they were actually making the types of things you need to drive a war machine.

We have a very narrow idea of what slavery was.

When you get to places like Richmond, slaves worked in flour mills.

They worked at iron factories, tobacco factories.

But even more importantly, many of the slaves who worked in this industrial capacity did not live with their owners.

So they're able to create these quasi-free communities where they etch out lives for themselves.

That quasi-freedom leads to a sense of independence that survives the Civil War.

And it paves the way forward.

- When those monuments went up, Richmond transitioned from a beacon of hope for Black people to the New South.

So, your freedom is now gone, right, that's - when the monuments first went up, that's what they meant.

- The erection of these monuments coincided with the darkest chapter, other than enslavement, in African American history.

When we got a taste.

We got a taste of freedom.

We got a taste of political power.

We got a taste of economic power.

And it was stripped away - sometimes violently, often violently.

- And year over year over year, generation over generation, people were working in resistance to that.

They understood that Jim Crow was gonna be slavery 2.0.

There is this germ of Black resistance because Black people had slavery to their rear and freedom to their front.

And they were not gonna allow that wall of Jim Crow to stop them.

- White Richmond was both appalled and afraid of what this meant.

They were afraid of no longer having control over that Black population.

They feared what equality would possibly mean.

They feared whether or not they would be subject to retribution from those newly freed people.

But the African American population, among the first things that they do is trying to find loved ones.

They're trying to rebuild that core.

Where is my sister?

Where is my father?

Where is my husband?

Where is my child?

- James Apostle Fields, my four-times great-grandfather was actually the victim of just a brutal beating.

And James had run away.

He had seized his own freedom.

This is during the war.

And so he was able to find the United States Army.

When he meets up with the United States Army, he serves as a scout there for a little while before deciding to make his way down to Freedom's Fortress at Fort Monroe, down in Hampton.

And lo and behold, as he arrives in Freedom's Fortress, who does he find, but the rest of his entire family who has gotten there before him and who had made their own separate way to freedom.

Now, after the war, schools are popping up.

Freed people are learning how to read, how to write.

And then, of course we have Hampton University, which at that point in time would be Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute.

And James is actually in the first graduating class at Hampton.

He ends up at Howard, becoming a lawyer after leaving Howard.

And he even takes that just a little bit further to start writing the law when he becomes a member of the House of Delegates of Virginia in 1889.

- The white political elite is being upended.

And they are being outnumbered in terms of their voting power.

- It belies the entire idea laid down by the Lost Cause that African Americans were unprepared for freedom.

If you actually look at the sources and you look at what Black people were doing after the Civil War, they knew full well what they wanted and they activated the machineries of their communities to get what they wanted.

- Among the first things that happens is African Americans start doing what's referred to as Decoration Day.

They knew that, generally speaking, white America was not going to honor their dead, right?

So, they do.

And so they began holding ceremonies and events in cemeteries where Black soldiers are buried.

And there are a few of those in Richmond.

- You also see at the same time, white women pulling their resources together.

They were determined that those deceased would not be forgotten.

That in many ways it would not be a lost cause.

- Many bodies just simply stayed in the field.

Ladies associations, usually led by middle- to upper-class white women, started paying poor whites to go and retrieve those bodies, a really grisly task.

- Perhaps most famously in Richmond, the Hollywood Memorial Association took the task before them of making sure that every Confederate who had died in the radius around Richmond would receive a proper, and by which they meant Christian, burial.

There were at least three different memorial associations in Richmond alone devoted to creating these Confederate cemeteries.

They're the ones who began the practice that we now know as Memorial Day.

These moments, over the course of several years, became not just a place to honor the dead, but a platform - quite literally, platforms - in which white Southerners, former Confederates, could stand up and denounce Reconstruction, could stand up and denounce emancipation and what they described as "Negro rule" and "radical rule."

So these cities of the dead, which did earnestly begin as a way to memorialize fallen loved ones, quickly became partisan.

They quickly became political.

They quickly became spaces of making comments and commentary about the political situation in the country.

- White people of the Confederacy didn't just reassert control over Richmond, over Virginia, or over the South for years after the Civil War, okay?

I think we tend to forget how contested that was.

Black people vote in enormous numbers and continued to do so throughout the 1870s and into the 1880s.

So you've got a biracial coalition that's the biggest threat to white Southerners who want to control their own future.

- There are 31, 31 African American men who are serving in the Virginia State Legislature.

And dozens upon dozens of them would continue to serve from 1870 all the way until 1889.

By 1889 when James is entering into that cadre of people, well, he's only one of four who are left.

The 1889 elections were heralded by newspapers.

The Richmond Dispatch, in particular, sums everything up pretty well: "White men do their duty well."

"White men rule the state."

"No home here for mixed politics."

The conservative party at the time, they know that they can divide the white coalition from the Black coalition.

But they know that they can't just get white people to vote for white people.

They need to remove the African American vote entirely.

So the second part of their strategy was to make sure that African Americans could not go to the polls - that they could not vote.

And James, as well as 100 other people, knew this.

In December of 1889, James and 100 other prominent African American men gathered in the city of Richmond.

They talked about it.

And they wrote a letter to Congress from that committee talking about the election fraud, the intimidation, the voter suppression, and the types of tactics that had been used to diminish the Black vote in the Commonwealth of Virginia in the latest elections.

- [Male petitioner] The election as held in the state of Virginia, November 6th, were characterized by fraud, reinforced by a wholesale disenfranchising of colored men, and denial to them to right of suffrage as guaranteed by the plain provisions of the Constitution of the United States.

- And they pleaded with the United States Congress.

They asked them to please, help us.

Do something about this.

- [Male petitioner] We call upon the 51st Congress to enact some legislation for the remedying of these evils.

- But Congress had already divested from the South at this point.

The Republicans in Congress have decided that they want to move on to other things.

Political will had waned.

And so, James and the other men simply never received a reply at all.

And at the same time that James and his colleagues are protesting this 1889 election, this "no home here for mixed politics" General Assembly, one of the first acts, one of the very first acts that they take: the Virginia Senate accepts, on behalf of the Commonwealth of Virginia, the Lee Monument.

And then it goes up, is unveiled in May of 1890.

- You have former Confederates, Jubal Early in particular, determined to tell the story of the Confederacy so that it's in its very best light.

And they recognize that to do so they need to dissociate it from slavery and that they need to elevate the constitutional claims that they make and also to elevate the personalities involved.

And the leading personality is Robert E. Lee, who's widely admired for being Christian, but also having been a important leader in the United States Army before the war, who had saved Richmond in 1862, and then had sustained the Confederate army against enormous odds for a long time.

Lee kind of embodied a lot of what the Confederacy wanted to imagine itself to have been.

- Not only was Lee a Virginian, but he was the Confederate.

- [Lee] If the Black people now were allowed to vote, it would, I think, exclude proper representation.

That is, proper, intelligent people would not be elected.

What the future may prove, how intelligent they may become, I cannot say more than you can.

- He died in October of 1870.

And within a matter of days after his death there were three competing associations who wanted to erect a memorial to who, the person that they saw as the embodiment of all that was good about the Confederacy.

It wasn't Jefferson Davis, it was Lee.

And although he will receive a memorial over his tomb in Lexington, where he is buried at Washington College, soon to be renamed Washington and Lee, they want a grand, equestrian statue.

A grand, larger than life, equestrian statue, to be in none other than the capital of the Confederacy.

And so these efforts began in earnest October, November of 1870.

And the ladies associations, those that had been so important in creating those Confederate cemeteries and creating Confederate Memorial Day, they are at the forefront, too.

- [Woman] The undersigned, connected with the Hollywood Memorial Association of Richmond, Virginia respectfully request the friends and admirers of General R. E. Lee to unite with them in a contribution for an equestrian bronze statue of our chieftain.

- And one of the really interesting parts of this is the battle that ensues between Confederate veterans and the women's associations, each vying to take control over who has the honor, the privilege, of creating this Memorial.

Jubal Early's association and the ladies association will send out canvassers across the South, not just to Virginia, not just to North Carolina, not just to former Confederate states, but to Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and elsewhere, seeking money for this monument.

When he is unveiled, in 1890, there are throngs of people that arrive in Richmond - some estimate around 100,000 people.

- For white Richmonders, the Lee Monument signifies hope that their cause will not be forgotten.

That here was a general who was willing, even though he was ambivalent, initially, he was willing to fight for Virginia to maintain the status quo.

It's amazing what people choose to remember.

The fact that Robert E. Lee sent so many to their death to maintain the status quo - it makes you wonder, how far are people willing to go to hold on to a history, to a way of life, that is unjust to so many?

In some cases, many thought of slavery as a paternal kind of thing, protection, a lifting up, a civilizing kind of thing.

Yet when you think about people like James and those who sought their freedom, there was nothing barbaric or ignorant or uninformed about them.

They were very clear about their efforts to seek freedom and to fight for it - at all costs.

(typewriter typing) - [John Mitchell, Jr.] What does this display of Confederate emblems mean?

What does it serve to teach the rising generations of the South?

This glorification fosters in this Republic, the spirit of rebellion, and will ultimately result in handing down to generations unborn a legacy of treason and blood.

- The Lee Monument, for John Mitchell, was the epitome of just the biggest mistake ever.

- But as far as what they represented, my family has always known what they represented.

They were pulling political power away from any Negroes that had any political power.

They were disenfranchised.

And he spoke out about it.

- [John Mitchell, Jr.] The Negro put up the Lee Monument and, should the time come, will be there to take it down.

- I view John Mitchell as that true civic journalist, because most journalists shy away from getting too close to the story.

For him, that was his passion - to be in the story.

- John Mitchell was the fighting editor.

He was at one point a politician, he's a newspaper man.

- Has a great logo of a Black man's arm with big bicep holding lightning bolts, which has two meanings - one, they're very advanced: they have an electric press.

But it's also, he's gonna throw lightning bolts at the structures of power.

Fearless enemy of police injustice, of lynching.

This is a guy in his twenties and thirties in the very first decades of freedom.

- He was boisterous, but he was just.

He came off with an air of, you know I'm right, right?

You did say all men were created equal, right?

- When John Mitchell spoke, people listened.

And in many ways, he along with Maggie Walker and other African American leaders, really were the vanguard.

- Maggie Lena Walker was an entrepreneur, an activist.

- The first woman to found and charter a bank in America.

She also was the first woman of color to run for statewide office in Virginia.

And she was the largest employer of Black women in the city of Richmond.

- She alongside John Mitchell in 1904 led a street car boycott.

- [Maggie Walker] We understand that in a few days we are to have Jim Crow street cars running on our streets.

Our advice to all Negroes is walk.

- African Americans were using these street cars to travel to their jobs.

And they were paying this regular price, but we're being treated as second-class citizens.

So what did they do?

They didn't have the vote anymore.

1902 Constitution of Virginia pulled that apart.

- The 1901 and 1902 Constitution is designed almost specifically to disinvest African Americans of their constitutional rights.

And the people who were responsible for convening that convention were explicit about that.

Very explicit about that.

- [Man] This convention undoubtedly has the power to provide for the restriction of suffrage as it may deem most wise and expedient.

- What it does is it uses poll taxes to remove 80% of African American voters from the voting rolls.

The dirty little secret though is it removes 50% of whites as well.

Virginia had one of the lowest voter turnout rates of any free democracy in the world and the lowest voter turnout rate of any state in the Union for most of the early 20th century.

- So without the vote how were they going to make those changes?

It was through economics.

Instead of riding the street cars, they would walk.

And for two years that boycott went - and it was successful.

The streetcar company went out of business.

- Mind you, this is 50 years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

- It showed a couple of things.

One, that a Black man really does have a voice even at that time and to make something happen.

But that a people bonded together and banded together can create a powerful message of unity to equal the social change.

- Two years, can you imagine?

Two years to be committed to that so that you can be seen as a full person.

That takes commitment.

- I feel that the monuments went up in direct retaliation to people like Maggie Walker really trying to advance African Americans in the community.

- The issue with Monument Avenue, is this issue of Black resistance and white supremacy.

Because at every single turn in Richmond's history, there has been a concerted effort to prevent Black people from achieving freedom.

- We see these moments in American history, these critical inflection points.

One of them being the rewriting of Reconstruction constitutions to take away all the rights that African Americans had gained after the end of the Civil War.

And those monuments cannot be separated from these initiatives.

They are inextricably linked to the nature in which people want to control politics and public space.

So you don't necessarily need an entire community to tell you they don't like Confederate iconography.

You know they knew exactly what it represented.

Maybe these people were either slaves themselves, right, or the immediate children of slavery.

They knew who these men were!

There's no way they would've looked at Confederate iconography as war memorials.

They would have saw them for what they were: an attempt to reassert control over the Black labor force and over Black bodies.

(audience cheering) (audience applauding) - [Man] It was not alone Richmond, nor Virginia, which turned out yesterday to greet the men in gray, for the whole South united to do honor to its heroes.

And from all parts of the Southern states, from the Gulf to the Ohio River, from California to the Potomac, men and women in whose breasts the love of chivalry still burns made the sacred pilgrimage to the shrine of the Lost Cause.

- [Man] He is entitled to the glorious judgment of the present generation, which will be rendered in consideration of the facts of his whole career.

History will surely give him an honorable and distinguished place among the noble characters of past times.

- Monument Avenue is clearly a product of wealthy white men at the end of the 19th century.

These leaders of industry felt that to create a city where businesses from elsewhere would want to move, where manufacturers from elsewhere would want to come live, They needed to advertise that Richmond was the kind of place where sophisticated, educated, wealthy patrons of the arts lived.

And in creating Monument Avenue, they felt that they were saying that.

- Richmond has this streetcar system, it has all these factories, it's prospering.

It has this new industry that really began during the war that's taking off, ah, cigarettes.

They develop a machine that can roll 100,000 cigarettes a day.

Richmond developed some of the earliest mass advertising for cigarettes.

So you develop a paper industry and a foil industry.

So Richmond finds new sources of income.

And one of the things it wants to do is to participate in a movement that's sweeping the country, that you make your city beautiful by building monumental spaces.

And, you also remember the Civil War generation that's fading away.

So all across the North, you would see Civil War monuments going up as well.

- There were other "City Beautiful" boulevards being built all over the country.

But Monument Avenue is really the only one with a sculptural program.

There are other streets with statues - decorative statues, fountains, even monuments on them.

But Monument Avenue was the only street that was sort of dedicated to one cause for so long.

- After the 50th anniversary of the war, 1911 to 1915 is full of reunions.

The Gettysburg reunion, 1913, being the most famous, certainly the most photographed.

But we see these veterans come back to their communities and there are efforts then to raise funds to honor that generation of Confederate veterans that is dying.

- Richmond was competing to be one of the leaders of the South.

As much as they wanted to commemorate the war, they had these conflicting ideas where they also wanted to move on and become the capital of the New South, as well as the capital of the Confederacy.

- The idea in Richmond is, okay, we're expanding to the west.

We could coordinate this effort to bring in Confederate monuments to create an entire avenue, anchored by the Lee statue, which has been there for a long time now.

Now, we can maybe add other monuments to that and create an entire boulevard that will be beautiful and attract the largest houses.

They see this as civic development.

And it's also the case that it's big business to bring these Civil War reunions together - 10,000 people coming, filling the hotels and restaurants of Richmond, right?

So you have that going on as well.

It's also, with Atlanta and other cities growing rapidly, it's a way for Richmond to sort of claim its place in history.

You're leveraging our history to be a modern place.

So the idea is, Monument Avenue is planned, it's of enormous scale, and it'll be one of the calling cards of Richmond, which it becomes for the next century.

A place that people would come to Richmond to see how you would combine modern real estate development and veneration for a lost cause.

- There's a sleight of hand going on.

In saying that the war wasn't about slavery, they're making an argument about state rights.

But what they're really trying to make an argument about is that white Southerners weren't treasonous.

This is the most important thing to the Confederate generation, to those men and women who fought and lived through the war, always proving that they weren't treasonous.

And there is a concerted effort, especially by the UDC.

The UDC is at the forefront of the movement to make sure that no one says the war was about slavery.

In their textbook campaigns, the catechism for the children of the Confederacy, young children are taught that the war was absolutely not about slavery.

There's an entire generation, several generations of white Southerners who come of age being told, by their teachers, by their parents, by their grandparents, the war was not about slavery.

This is an indoctrination that was quite purposeful.

Many of the most vocal and active members of the Confederate heritage associations, specifically the United Daughters of the Confederacy, were either young children during the war or were born after the war and came of age during Reconstruction.

So it's Reconstruction more than the war that is forming their view of the world.

But still they latch onto that identity of Confederates.

They're responding to what might've been.

For the Daughters, in particular, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, there is a sense that the war took away more from them than just the quest for Confederate independence - that it robbed them of what their grandmothers and perhaps even mothers had, this notion of being a Southern lady.

It robbed them of the privileges of slaveholding, even if they had not been of the slaveholding class, that was an aspiration that they felt had been taken from them.

So to be a member of the UDC was to claim your place in the social, racial, and gender hierarchy of the New South.

- [Announcer] A gracious land where dwell a gracious people.

Here, in all its storybook romance is the land of Dixie.

- For over two centuries white Southerners had persuaded themselves that the Black people they held in slavery did not resent it and had even persuaded themselves that Christian faith told them that they were to be good masters to their servants, that they were surrogate parents, right?

Well, when that is destroyed and when Black people have shown at the first moment that they have always wanted to be free and are capable of being free and are hungry for education and economic advancement and able to build their own churches, it's a complete shock to white Southerners who had an entirely different kind of story that Black people were incapable of this sort of achievement.

So, what might you do?

Well, one thing you would do is to constrain that achievement to make sure that people stayed "in their place."

But another part of what you would do is to parody and caricature that Black accomplishment and achievement.

So you find a lot of blackface minstrelsy and all that is actually making fun of using large vocabularies, of dressing well.

A lot of those things are actually trying as hard as they can to deflate Black ambition and accomplishment.

- I do believe the monuments, the minstrel shows, it's all about this fear.

Perhaps they're not as inferior as we thought.

Perhaps they could rise up.

- I presume there's still some good ones around.

Of course, there are some getting some ideas and that's all right - that's progress.

But uh, we've got some mighty good darkies here.

- There was always that fear, always, because when you're living in a society that espouses the rhetoric of freedom and liberty and justice for all, you've got to have some fear that they're gonna rise up.

They're going to rebel and revolt against this inequality.

- The Negro is not a part of my family.

As a result, I don't elect have him sit and eat with me.

As a result, I don't like to have him belong to a club that I may belong to.

- We fought a war.

We lost our family.

Our soil is soaked with blood.

Yet they're still here.

They're still rising up.

What can we do?

(tense music) - In the mid 20th century, the United States embarks on a series of campaigns to update its cities, in large part because cities were built haphazardly.

So, it's not coming from a bad place, per se.

But people bring their biases to bear on this process.

And in the South, that's often done almost exclusively with recourse to race.

- The public concept of urban renewal was to improve blighted areas.

In fact, in Richmond, it was used to try to change the racial composition of the city.

They tore down, over a period of 25 years, every single major Black neighborhood in the city.

- As cities decide to build freeways, they often decide to build them through neighborhoods where people can't vote or people don't have the type of political influence that they might have in other places.

- It will benefit us tremendously economically, it's a vital importance to national and civil defense, and it'll make life easier and more enjoyable for all of us.

- Jackson Ward was a community even before the Civil War.

It was a community that was inhabited by immigrants, European immigrants, Jewish people, and free and enslaved Blacks.

As time progressed though, it became officially called Jackson Ward as a voting ward, which was gerrymandered, designed to contain the Black vote.

But once the 1901-1902 Virginia Constitution was passed that effectively stripped away the voting rights of Black males and poor whites the community in Jackson Ward, the people in Jackson Ward, were building a community within segregation that was like a second city where you could get what you needed and be treated with dignity and respect.

- Jackson Ward was referred to as the "Harlem of the South."

There was a really bustling community here.

- They really knew each other in the community.

Either they were related to them or they had been in their homes and they had dined with them and they also had cared for people in their family.

They also worshiped together.

- All of those institutions, organizations, and businesses are sacrificed at the altar of suburban access to the city or automobile access to the city.

- [Announcer] The cleanly designed and perfectly functional highway has a beauty of its own.

- The white leadership of the city and the General Assembly, which was very egregiously involved in this, decided to run an interstate highway right through the middle of Jackson Ward.

And they dug a trench, 80 feet deep and 18 blocks long, and basically cut the entire core Black neighborhood in half displacing 10,000 people.

The wild fact of this is that there's a natural valley that carries the same route four blocks away.

It would have been cheaper to build the road there, it would be natural to build the road there, and the valley is still vacant, except for one railroad track.

- It did not make sense for I-95 to go through Jackson Ward.

It did not make any sense.

But it was, you know, what part of Richmond are you gonna tear up?

Are you gonna tear up the part near the Capitol?

Are you gonna tear up the part near Patrick Henry's church?

Or are you gonna tear up the part near Monument Avenue?

Or are you gonna tear up Jackson Ward, Fulton, Idlewood - the Black areas.

They want it connected to the suburbs.

They want to get highways through here.

They are protecting Confederate monuments.

That was a point made by the Virginia Chamber of Commerce and the Richmond Chamber of Commerce.

"We have to protect the Confederate monuments."

"We do not let modernity run through our heritage."

- [Man] Richmond has not let it's eagerness to put a new gloss on its downtown dim its pride in its past.

Careful planning has enabled the city to retain such noble old structures as the Confederate White House.

- The Jackson Ward community pleaded with the city fathers not to strip Jackson Ward into two pieces, but to keep it whole.

But they didn't listen.

- Jackson Ward is split in half, literally.

But also, the Commonwealth of Virginia embarks on a campaign called Massive Resistance to public school integration.

- [Governor] I come before you today for the purpose of submitting recommendations to continue our system of segregated public schools.

- And African Americans at that point recognized that most of the progress, the piecemeal progress that they'd achieved after the Second World War, was in deep jeopardy.

And they reactivate their communities.

And there are probably no more important individuals in Richmond that lay the foundation than the Crusade for Voters - not to elect one or two individuals to city council, but to change the balance of power.

- When the Crusade for Voters started, it started with William Ferguson Reid, who was a surgeon, William Thornton, who was a podiatrist, John Brooks, who was very involved in NAACP voter registration efforts, and an amazing educator named Ethel Thompson Overby.

- [Female organizer] By using your votes wisely, voting for the right people, impossible doors will be opened.

- When they had their organizing meeting and they were trying to figure out what to name the organization, my grandfather, he said, "We need to have a crusade for voters.

We need to just have a crusade!"

And so that stuck.

- And this comes down to a handful of individuals who organized in almost military fashion, precinct by precinct, brick by brick, block by block, going around this community - this community!

- with bullhorns, knocking on people's doors, asking - shaming people to vote, in fact!

And they're able to do this successfully in large part because of the kind of closed-in nature of segregated communities.

These people are organizing voters and whites had no idea what they were doing until it was too late.

- They were interested in what social justice is really about.

Making sure that people have an opportunity for civic and political participation.

They were interested in jobs.

They were interested in education.

Those tenants of what human dignity and social justice are about were no different then than what the cry for social justice is now.

- This place had one of the lowest voter turnout rates in the United States, in large part not because of violence, but because of the poll tax.

And what the Crusade does is they recognize if we can just get people to pay this tax they can show up to vote.

And that's exactly what they did.

And this isn't voting for the sake of voting.

Saying, we recognize that public policy and the fact that there aren't African Americans involved in this process is part of the reason why our communities look the way they do.

They were not interested in voting for symbolic reasons, they were interested in voting so that they could finally do something about policies that had torn their communities asunder.

That is an essential component of the Civil Rights Movement.

- It was like an electric period.

There was the baptist minister association.

You had the teacher's association, the Black social workers, and then the sorority.

Everybody wanted be a part of the shape within this mix.

It was like an explosion.

- Do you wanna be free?

- Yeah!

- Do you wanna be free?

- Yeah!

- Do you wanna be free?

- Yeah!

- Freedom!

(cheering) - So by 1966, you have three, one year after the Voting Rights Act, you have three Black officials sitting on city council: Henry Marsh, Sonny Cephas, and Winfred Mundle.

That success is followed by white resistance, which culminates in what we call vote dilution.

Whites realize, if we can't stop African Americans from voting, we can dilute the power of those votes once they're cast.

And they do this, not just in Richmond, but throughout the South.

But here, they annex a predominantly white suburb.

By simply adding more voters to the voting ranks they're able to dilute the power of those African Americans who are registered.

44,000 whites to be precise.

Which, in many ways, pulls the rug out from under African Americans and all the efforts to achieve some sense of community control between the mid 1950s and the 1960s.

And no one recognizes this more than the Crusade and Curtis Holt, who was a bit of a political gadfly.

- Curtis Holt was a grassroots organizer that lived in public housing, who had done a lot of work organizing poor Black and white residents.

He was working to get Black voter participation and had actually sued the city to fight the annexation of bringing more whites into the city to dilute Black voter strength.

- So the Supreme Court comes in and they suspend local elections in Richmond because of the annexation - that lasts for seven years.

Richmond is not allowed to have city council elections for seven years.

When the Supreme court comes down and says, we will allow you to create a district system that gives African Americans back the voting clout they had before you annexed.

And that system leads, in 1977, to the historical election of a five-to-four Black majority council in Richmond that initiates a complexion revolution in not only Richmond politics, but Southern politics, and even American politics that characterizes American politics to this day.

- That was so happy.

That was a happy night.

The people, the joy - yes, we won.

We won, yeah.

Hmm!

- [Reporter] A city whose foremost tourist attraction is a street lined with monuments to the men who battled the US government in order to maintain white supremacy, now has a Black mayor, a predominantly Black city council.

Out in Hollywood Cemetery, Jefferson Davis must be turning over in his grave.

Relinquishing control of such a city did not sit well with the grandsons and daughters of slaveowners and aristocrats.

- One day after I got elected someone from Atlanta newspaper called and said, Mr. Richardson, what are you all gonna do about the statues?

And at that time we had such a plate full of issues - housing, transportation, education, unemployment - that the statues were not on the top item of our plate.

- I said to myself, all the things we got to be concerned about, I hate to tell 'em, that was not a priority, that was never a discussion.

I found that amazing!

But they said it.

No, we don't want to do that!

Now we want take some of the money that you have to clean it up and fix it up and so we could do some other things with it.

Robert E. Lee is dead - it ain't him I got to worry about.

It's the racists, living and sitting across from me at council.

- They're doing political triage.

They recognize that, sure, the monuments are problematic.

But there are generations of kids who have been undereducated in Richmond Public Schools.

We have the compression of poverty in housing projects.

There are real problems in the city that they have to address first.

- They had no understanding of what it was like to be poor and just to have the basic and still try to make it.

And everybody was into money.

They had money, they were born to money and prestige and privilege.

And I thought they needed a social worker.

- I was drafted into the Marines.

I spent 12 months in Vietnam.

And those were not good days.

And when I got on council, I was kind of angry.

And so I used that microphone to get back at any authority figure, any status quo.

- When they took power, the first thing they had to do was prove they could run the city.

Because early on the word was, "Black leaders are gonna destroy the city, the city's gonna go broke."

- The monuments were not an obstacle to them.

Clearly they were an annoyance and a nuisance to Black folks in Richmond because of what they represented.

- There was no sense that they would ever go away.

They seemed big - and permanent.

You know, historically, Black folks have simply avoided Monument Avenue.

There is a quotation from a man in 1955 where he said, "I could never go to Monument Avenue..." - [Man] I cannot go on Monument Avenue and visit a white girl, from fear of being lynched.

But let some white guy come around on Second Street and nothing's done about it.

Virginia is the home of presidents, but it is not the home of democracy.

- It clearly was a place where Black Richmonders were not welcome.

You know, they designed those monuments to have an especially heroic posture because when you're telling a lie, it's gotta be a big lie.

You know, it can't be a timid lie.

Because you're conveying that this is something you should revere, something you should worship, something that should intimidate you if you're of a certain hue.

- Monument Avenue has never been about the statues.

They were part of the whole thing.

We're about homes, we're about houses, we're trying to keep 'em up, we're trying to keep other people from coming in and painting 'em blue and putting in rooming houses and that.

And we went through that, and that's part of what started the whole movement on Monument Avenue Preservation Society was to get that back to single family, to the grandeur that it had at one point.

We're just people like everybody else.

We just happen to like this old street.

It happened to have monuments on it that were there when I was born.

They meant nothing.

They were just pretty.

- Two of the statues, um, I'm kin to.

Robert E. Lee and Jeb Stuart are both - I'm related to 'em.

So on my first trip to Richmond, when I was probably 15, my grandmother brought me and we went to Monument Avenue, looked at these relatives and we're proud of these relatives.

She was so proud, I guess, because again, she was very active with the UDC.

I never thought what Monument signified.

I just didn't think that.

- But there are people of color that negotiated the back ways and byways and the service entries on Monument Avenue, some who weren't even allowed to walk on the sidewalks of Monument Avenue, who knew full well what those monuments meant.

- You know, you have Jefferson Davis with a Greek goddess figure and the Latin phrasing, "We are vindicated."

That is not harmless.

It is a luxury of whiteness that enables you to say, "nobody really thought about that."

When in reality, people thought about it all the time - that it isn't a grand boulevard of beauty, but rather, a grand boulevard of ongoing violence.

- I put in a paper in 1991 recommending that some civil rights statues be placed on Monument Avenue to desanctify the notion that it was a solemn piece of land, that no one should put anything up there except Civil War generals and Civil War heroes.

And my contention was that Monument Avenue should be a continuum of history and represent some current progress.

- He's shot down, he's shot down and not so violently by the council, the council says "No," but by residents, residents that are like, "No, this avenue is for Confederate heroes, this is Confederate history, that's it."

- On this labor day as the US Open enters its final week we rebroadcast an October 1992 interview with the late Arthur Ashe.

He is one of the most admired men ever to play the game and in this conversation, you'll appreciate why.

When you now think of Richmond do you, and because your father died there, you mother died there, it was home, but does it- - It still is.

- You still consider it home?

- Oh yes, Richmond is.

And I am chauvinistic about Richmond and Virginia still, oh yes.

Because while I remember those racial slights, I also remember the good things that happened to me as a result of my interaction with whites as well as Blacks.

Yes, but I'm very much a Virginian.

- [Charlie Rose] Was tennis an opportunity for you to see racism right up front?

- [Arthur Ashe] Well it was when I was 12 years old because when I was 12 my coach took me over to Byrd Park, which was then the white park in the city, to try to play in an official sanctioned US Tennis Association tournament - and I was turned down.

We figured we would be, but we were gonna test it anyway.

[Charlie Rose] (chuckles) Yeah, right.

- That, I graphically remember, because there was a very kind man, his name was Sam Woods, and he said, "No, I would like to have you play but we just can't; the laws are the way they are."

But you don't forget that incident.

[Charlie Rose] Yeah.

- I mean, Arthur Ashe was another personal hero of mine.

He started a mentoring program called Virginia Heroes with Richmond public schools where we would mentor middle-school students.

That's how I actually met him.

And when he died, Richmond struggled with how to honor him.

It's a complicated legacy because how do you honor someone you rejected?

He had to leave Richmond to become his best self.

Like a generation, like generations of Richmonders - and imagine what Richmond would be if Richmond had not chased out its best and brightest Black minds.

- Everybody knows about his athletic accomplishments.

He did a plethora of other stuff, bridging people, and he was truly giving.

I believe he wanted to be remembered for his works for humanity.

Tennis was just a stepping stone.

- City council officials finally recognize that since we have control over this city politically, the best we can do to combat the continuity of Monument Avenue is to build a statue to not just the local hero, but a national and international hero.

- The issue became quite volatile.

- I think it hit a nerve because of the discussion of where, where is this going to be placed?

And it wasn't as if the quest or the question was to take away monuments.

The quest was to add a monument.

- I began to think, well, we need to break the color line at Monument Avenue.

That's where my head was at back then.

And I wasn't alone.

So Governor Wilder was pushing the idea.

City Councilman Chuck Richardson was very much behind the idea.

Ray Boone, the late, great editor of the Richmond Free Press was very opposed to the idea.

He said, "Arthur Ashe would be the only champion on the street."

And he called Monument Avenue, "Losers Lane."

- No one thought it would pass, but it passed because it was right.

- And Mr. Mayor.

- Aye.

- Ayes seven, nos none, abstain one, the paper is adopted.

- [Reporter] "The healing of a city."

That's how Richmond mayor Leonidas Young is describing city council's decision to locate the Arthur Ashe statue on Monument Avenue and Roseneath Road.

- We hear and feel what you are saying in regards to a definite need for symbolism that finally ends the feud and reconciles Monument Avenue.

- Richmond's mayor is calling this the city's "finest hour," placing the Ashe statue on Monument Avenue is a step towards healing old wounds.

But at least one council member says, "This former capital of the Confederacy still has a hell of a long way to go."

- The dedication was about a year later.

Huge crowd - the intersection was overflowing.

It was a celebration as if Richmond had turned a corner.

You did have the people on the periphery with the Confederate flag, but they were quiet.

They weren't vocal, they were just visible.

- When that moment that it's unveiled you realize like, okay, this is a lot bigger than what we think we were arguing about.

You know, it's like the beginning part of the city of Richmond, so it's welcoming.

And it says, okay, it true shows what we're about, but then it also tells you, this is where we came from as well.

- That strange juxtaposition of a civil rights hero and people who fought in defense of African American enslavement - together created a conversation because it in some ways embodies the strange juxtaposition of bondage and freedom that had always been around in Virginia.

So in some ways what we see with the Arthur Ashe statue is something to 21st century eyes might not look revolutionary, but I'm not so certain that the conversations we're having around monuments right now would be the same if that statue weren't there.

- It did provide the city with some sort of result that says, you know what, we can go in a different direction.

You know, if we can put a Black man on Monument Avenue what else can we do here?

- Our work has been to create a shift.

Richmond, Virginia, perhaps unwittingly, ushered in the African presence in America.

Shockoe Bottom was a trading post.

It was a revolving door of people going in and going out.

It was a market.

The up South market.

The biggest business in Richmond was trading Black people.

There were dozens of dealers, traders, auctioneers, commission merchants, preparing people for sale, at least 300,000 people.

So many people can trace their ancestors to Shockoe Bottom, because they could've been there a few hours, they could have been there a day, they could have been there a week.

But they entered in that revolving door.

And it's foundational to how not only Richmond became a city, but it's foundational to Virginia and the nation.

But this whole area was just nothing.

- The first African Burial Ground, as we call it, was established by the city down in Shockoe Bottom for Black burials.

We decided to start the Sacred Ground Historical Reclamation Project in order to provide a vehicle for claiming the burial ground from being a parking lot and confronting histories that had been either marginalized or twisted or obliterated.

- To think that this area is not memorialized, that it took, you know, years and years and years of community struggle to get a state institution, Virginia Commonwealth University, to take its parking lot off the African Burial Ground, is mind-boggling.

- Ultimately the burial ground was reclaimed.

It was taken from private property, from VCU, and moved to the city.

And we have been working either with officials or alongside officials or encouraging officials or sometimes against officials to make sure that the burial ground itself and what it represents doesn't get lost.

- The statues always were a parallel situation to Shockoe Bottom.

The elevation and the glorification of the Confederate leaders on this side of town and the complete neglect of this incredibly important Black history over here in Shockoe Bottom.

- And we want to reinstill the humanity in our families.

We're talking about our families.

There's some dues to pay in Shockoe Bottom.

That day is coming, the shift is happening.

- What other individuals in the city of Richmond, what other items, what other things do we need to lift up?

(tense music) - That story of the monument to Maggie Walker is just so amazing because Maggie Walker's monument is definitely a community-based monument.

- It was a long struggle to get the statue.

We really wanted it to be something that engaged with the community.

The biggest goal was to tell a more complete story.

- So the community groups had come together and chosen a site at Broad, Brook, and Adams that would be appropriate for a monument.

And the family was behind it.

It became a part of the public art program, to get public input broadly - not just the select few, but a broad public input, through public meetings.

That process created a memorial by 2017 that is a gathering space.

This is the beauty of having public input, to hear from so many different sides is how the monument, the memorial to Maggie Walker came to be a space that is well-used and well-respected today.

- And where she stands is the trail that they used to take slaves from Shockoe Bottom out into the counties.

And that road, specifically, is where they would've passed.

- That bit of Brook Road that led from Richmond's downtown area out to Hanover, for me, turned out to be more significant than I even realized.

I thought it was just a piece of road.

As I learned more about that space and learned about that traffic from Richmond's Shockoe Bottom out to Hanover County, I was able to put together the story that that was where my ancestor, James Fields, had been driven, from the jails down in Richmond, where he had been captured trying to escape to have freedom for himself as a young man.

Where he most likely would have been driven along with the cattle, with the goods, from the market back to Hanover, where he was going to be re-enslaved.

Where he didn't give in, where he escaped one more time.

And after freedom comes he becomes a legislator in the House of Delegates.

Most likely traveling up and down that very spot in Broad Street, heading to the State Capitol.

Going by that very space.

- While slavery in the United States was a story of victimization and brutalization, it is also a Black story of survivorship, that we found our own ways of continuing our story and continuing our lives and developing our communities.

When I think about James and I think about how he protested against the monuments of white supremacy when the first and the largest monument was going up, he probably never would have thought that his great, great, great, great grandson would be actively seeing that same monument that he saw go up, come down.

- The conversation went to removal after some of the horrendous, homicidal events of the last five years, from Charleston, South Carolina, to Charlottesville, and of course, to Minneapolis.

- These monuments constitute a default endorsement of a shameful period in our nation and in our city.

That is why I am pleased to announce the creation of the Monument Avenue Commission.

I had people come to me and say, "What are you doing, young man?"

Right, I'm still 35, 36 years-old, the youngest mayor of the city.

And some thought what I was trying to do was misguided.

But what I saw was that this tidal wave was headed to Richmond because I believe prior to us it was the acts of Dylann Roof in South Carolina in Charleston.

And you saw that act be an inflection point in the racial reckoning here in our country.

And you saw the South Carolina flag come down and you saw monuments from across the country started coming down in places like Baltimore, New Orleans came next.

- Mayor Stoney set up what he called the Monument Avenue Commission to decide what to do with the statues.

But he specifically said the commission could not recommend taking the statues down.

- I wish these monuments had never been built, but whether we like it or not they are a part of our history of the city, and removal would never wash away that stain.

- The initial process that the Commission undertook was difficult at first.

The hardest meeting was at the Virginia Historical Society, now the Virginia Museum of History and Culture.

it became raucous after a while.

- Now is the time for us to finally put the past in the past and tear down participation trophies for the losing side of a war.

You lost, get over it already!

- Monument Avenue is a Confederate memorial in and of itself and I do not want to see any monuments on there from any of them low-down, invading, murdering, raping, looting, burning heathens from the North.

(audience cheering) (audience applauding) - After Charlottesville in 2017, there was a big push to take down Confederate icons and imagery, you know, across Virginia.

- The community chimed-in and said, "Removal has to be on the table."

And so we asked the Commission to explore removal as well.

- We put forth our recommendations, that context be added to the monuments, and that the Jefferson Davis monument be relocated to Hollywood Cemetery where the gravesite is.

Nothing was done.

That was very disappointing.

- And then, obviously, we had the, uh, the incident with me and the yearbook.

- [Reporter] the Friday discovery of a racist photo on Governor Ralph Northam's 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook page has drawn calls for his resignation from every corner of the Virginia political establishment and beyond.

- [Christy Coleman] For a lot of people, I mean those images, even if they're 35 years ago, still have a real power and they have an ugliness.

- [Reporter] Now he tells the Washington Post he wants to devote the remainder of his term to racial reconciliation.

- I mean, once we open our eyes and see what's going on around us, we realize that we have some challenges that need to be addressed.

And that's why I really think in 10, 20 years, people will look back and say, "What took you all so long to take down, you know, monuments?"

- So the Constitution of the Commonwealth states that removal essentially is off the table for localities, right?

Any sort of war memorial, which also includes the Civil War, off the table.

In 2019 Democrats won the General Assembly back and for the first time in a very long time we had the governorship and the two chambers.

(gavel thudding) - You are not erasing history.

You're empowering people to tell it.

You're letting our communities come together to share our stories with each other and decide for ourselves what to celebrate.

- If there had been a balance to history in this Commonwealth, maybe if the truth had been told in terms of erecting statues and telling everyone's story, not just talking about those individuals who are are riding on their high horses, their contribution, but also the contributions of African Americans and how they helped build this nation.

Maybe if their truth had been told then we would not be here at this place at this time.

The problem has been that half of the story has been told.

Madam speaker, I hope you pass the bill.

(audience applauds) - [Madam Speaker] The clerk shall close the roll.

- [Clerk] Ayes, 53, nays, 46, abstentions, zero.

- The bill passes.

(audience cheering) (audience applauding) - The movement continued to build and become more powerful, leading to a change in the General Assembly that ultimately changed the law, giving localities the ability to touch those statutes.

And the idea, I think, driven by young people and their movement-building and their organizing and their sense of, "enough is enough."

"Why would we tolerate this?"

"Why would we allow this to sit in our public square?"

And ultimately that movement stood as fertile ground on which the anger and the sense of injustice when George Floyd was so brutally and in many regards, casually murdered.

- I can't breathe!

- I can't breathe!

- Black lives matter!

- We are here not for ourselves, but for the countless Black lives that have been unfortunately lost to police violence.

Trayvon, Freddie, Philando.

Everybody we've lost, all of our brothers and our sisters.

(activist chanting) We are here, and we're strong!

(police sirens wailing) - Monument Avenue became the focal point because it was the most visible symbol of that kind of systemic racism in the city of Richmond.

That's why they became those kinds of targets, because they are symbols of the kind of brutality, white supremacy, and suppression that Black people have been experiencing and feeling for decades and generations.

- There is a hierarchy of human value and we aren't standing for it anymore.

And that statue, the Lee statue, became a magnet for protestors because it embodied so much of that.

- And Monday comes along, people gathered up at the Lee Circle and I was on my way there when I start the hearing the shouting and the screaming.

People had just been teargassed while on their knees with their hands up.

Tear gas canisters were launched into the Lee Circle, into crowds that included both children and pets.

- [Protestor] Look at what you're protecting, you cowards!

- They used tear gas on four year-olds and dogs.

- It was wrong that what happened yesterday!

I apologize for that!

It should - it should - It should've never happened!

- You're not saying anything and that's why we're not listening.

(activists cheering) We want actions, we want concrete actions!

- In Alabama, they took down a Confederate statue.

In Down South Alabama, they took it down!

What are we gonna do in Richmond?

We want them down!

Tear them down, tear them down!

Tear them down, tear them down!

Tear them down, tear them down!

Tear them down, tear them down!

Tear them down, tear them down!

Tear them down, tear them down!

Tear them down, tear them down!

- It was such an expression, of course initially, of grief and rage, right.

And they were available, those monuments standing there representing what they have represented all this time and being debated over for the last several years.

Suddenly there - the tolerance for debate and conversation were gone and people needed to see them come down and so they came down.

- All of this is taking place within the context of a pandemic, which, I think, laser-focused us in ways that never would've happened before.

I think we're all suffering in ways big and small and I think our internal suffering has left us more attuned to the larger suffering.

So we have to pay attention.

- It's made you think, you know, are you doing the right thing?

Are you not doing the right thing?

Or are you not doing anything?

- In order to heal, you have to first of all understand, you know, what's wrong, where is the pain?

And we saw tremendous pain and hurting across this country and even here in Virginia with the protests.

And so, when those kinds of things happen, we as elected officials and leaders, I think it's incumbent on us to make changes that will help that healing process.

Virginia has never been willing to deal with symbols, until now.

The statue of Robert E. Lee is the most prominent.

The state owns it.

It sits on a 100-foot circle of land, a state-owned island, surrounded by the city of Richmond.

Yes, that statue has been there for a long time.

But it was wrong then, and it is wrong now.

So I am directing the Department of General Services to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee as soon as possible.

(audience applauds) - [Reporter] Around the world people are tearing down statues honoring racist figures and wrestling with which ones should stand.

You could argue that Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy is at the center of this debate.

Protestors there have toppled several statutes already.

And at a city council meeting today, Richmond mayor Levar Stoney said he wants city-owned Confederate monuments removed immediately.

Hours later, a crane rolled up to a statue of Stonewall Jackson.

- I mean, we could point to a Chuck Richardson or a Levar Stoney, or a Doug Wilder, or a Henry Marsh.

But we didn't do it.

None of us stood up and said, "the statues have got to go."

The politicians followed the people!

(tense music) (tools whirring) (audience cheering) (audience applauding) - [Melody Barnes] John Mitchell wrote, when Lee statue went up, "it was Black people who put it up and they'll be there when they bring it down."

(tense music) (thunder booming) (activists cheering) - Whose streets?

- Our streets!

- Whose streets?

- Our streets!

- Whose streets?

- Our streets!

- Whose streets?

- Our streets!

- Whose streets?

- Our streets!

- Whose streets?

- Our streets!

(bells chiming) - After years of active protest around this, the city felt that this is the one thing that it can do.

Now, whether or not that's correct, because the city has a lot of power.

It can address the systemic racism.

It could address the issues of police brutality and holding the police accountable.

- [Reporter] Three years ago, the community demanded change after Richmond police fatally shot a 24 year-old Black man named Marcus-David Peters.

Peters had just finished teaching a high-school science class and his family believes he was having a psychiatric episode when he charged police officers on a freeway ramp naked and unarmed.

Advocates called for the creation of a Marcus Alert system.

It took lawmakers two more years to pass the law.

Peters's family denounced the measure as watered-down and ineffective.

- Back in 2018, we've been calling for some of the same demands such as a Marcus Alert, to prevent someone that's having a mental health crisis from having the results of a death sentence like Marcus-David Peters.

We've been fighting for that since 2018.

We've been calling for police accountability since 2018, with the demand of the creation of an independent civilian review board with subpoena power as we don't trust the police to police themselves.

- Throughout our history it has always taken a breaking point in order to push progress.

And so we are going through that moment right now, we don't know exactly what progress is literally going to be made.

But the one thing that has been done is that we have challenged the symbols of white supremacy.

We have challenged the marginalization and invisibility of Black culture and presence - true and rich representation of that.

- [Reporter] It's still unclear whether Governor Ralph Northam will be permitted to take down the statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond.

- [Reporter] A group of Monument Avenue residents sued Governor Northam early in the summer.

They argue he doesn't have the authority to take down the 60-foot statue.

And if he does, they say it will affect the neighborhood's historic designation and property values.

- People talk about their concern for their property value and the historic tax credits, and tourism, and the iconic nature of this avenue.

And I can't tell you how offended I am by each and every one of those arguments.

I live here.

I own my house here.

If I were to lose some value to this home because those monuments came down I would consider it a loss well worth taking.

But that, first of all, imagines that there will be value lost.

- The Lee Monument in particular, of course, is now under, I can't imagine how many layers of paint - paint and ideas and emotions.

But also, the fact that they transformed it into a memorial.

It was incredible and it was a pure expression of collective sentiment.

- I know some people see it as graffiti, I see it as an expression, a scream, a shout of a new community, a new place to live and I wish there was some way to preserve that as a piece of our important change history.

What is Richmond gonna really be, what is our future?

- It's the beginning, not the end.

Taking down Confederate statues is the easy part.

I know that's - it's 'cause it's been difficult, right?

But it's the beginning of a more complicated phase of 21st-century activism and organization.

The real problems now have to be addressed.

- See, those monuments are symbolic, okay, there's symbolic.

It is great to have them down.

Yay, gold star for us.

But taking those monuments down are not going to stop the brutalization, the profiling, the harassment, you know, the systemic racism, it's not.

- What we really have to do is the hard work of getting at the root of what they symbolized to dig that root out and to address those issues.

That we address our housing issues.

That we address the food insecurity issues.

That we ensure that every child here can go to Richmond Public Schools and can be proud of that, can get the kind of education that they deserve so that they can fulfill their wildest dreams.

That's what I really hope for the city - and that, that will be the best possible monument that we can have to who we should be as a community.

- So the statues have mostly come down.

The monuments still remain.

So we have to make sure we're taking down not just the visible statues, but the actual monuments and legacy of white supremacy in our city.

What does justice and liberation and abolition look like to you?

What does that feel like?

How will it affect your great, great, great, great-grandchild?

What is the world that they're going to live in?

You see that, you visualize it, you dream about it, and then you use this moment to make it happen.

Because maybe it's not your four-times great-grandchild who needs to see it.

Maybe it's your three-times great, maybe it's your two-times great, maybe it's your grandchild.

Maybe it's just your child.

Maybe it's you.

We are at a moment right now where we can get to these points.

We can have our wildest dreams realized within our lifetimes.

We just have to have the will to do it and to see it through.

("Southern Man" by Neil Young, performed by Merry Clayton) ♪ Southern man, better keep your head ♪ ♪ Don't forget what your good book said ♪ ♪ Southern change gonna come at last ♪ ♪ Now your crosses are burning fast ♪ ♪ Southern man ♪ ♪ Southern man ♪ ♪ I saw cotton and I saw black ♪ ♪ Tall white mansions and little shacks ♪ ♪ Southern man, ♪