Virginia capital's planned civil rights memorial will help to set the record straight

Date published: 3/3/2008

SOME WRONGS take a long, long time to right. So it is with the lingering evils of slavery and segregation. Their handmaidens, racism and prejudice, live with us still. But lest one despair that individual acts of conscience are irrelevant in confronting powerful persecutors, events in the heart of Virginia's capital offer hope.

On the great stage that is Richmond's Capitol Square, the Old Dominion is, at last, about to memorialize some of the courageous souls who vanquished Jim Crow policies in public education. Last week, ground was broken for the square's first monument to the commonwealth's African-Americans.

Without the labors and sacrifices of blacks, of course, Virginia would have amounted to much less. Having landed at Jamestown a few scant years after the first English colonists, African slaves helped build Virginia's plantations and fortunes, enabling the planter aristocracy to take root and flourish.

But on the grounds of the state Capitol, until very recently, it was if this long, proud, and complex black heritage didn't exist. Nowhere did a marker signal the accomplishments of the state's African-Americans, a fact made more painful by the history of this same building: It was once the capitol of the Confederate States of America, whose victory would have indefinitely preserved slavery in the South.

As one enters the grounds, an imposing monument to Virginia native George Washington and other Founding Fathers evokes wonder. A few yards north of the Capitol stands a row of other notable Virginians: William "Extra Billy" Smith, congressman, Confederate general, and two-time governor, who opposed suffrage for ex-slaves; Lt. Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, the extraordinary battlefield tactician; Dr. Hunter Holmes McGuire, chief surgeon of Jackson's Second Corps, later a medical innovator and humanitarian; Edgar Allan Poe, poet and novelist, who called Richmond home; Gov. and U.S. Sen. Harry Flood Byrd Sr., who championed Virginia's Massive Resistance campaign to block school desegregation.

Of those five, three are Confederate icons and one prolonged the injustices of the Jim Crow era. To any fair-minded visitor, this bronze parade of white leaders seems sadly out of step with our more inclusive times.

Date published: 3/3/2008