Four Monuments in a Southern City: 130 Years of Continuity in Richmond, Virginia’s Racial Politics

Sarah Nidia Ochs

Advisor: Amaka Okechukwu

Committee Members: Blake Silver, Nancy Hanrahan

Online Location,
July 22, 2025, 02:00 PM to 04:00 PM

Abstract:

In 2020, people across the country were chanting “Black Lives Matter” and tagging Confederate monuments, including the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia, transforming them into symbols of racial progress. When Lee was originally built in 1890, the Civil War was within living memory and “Jim Crow” segregation was building across the city. While much news coverage argued this demonstrated racial progress, I use discursive and structural analysis of four Richmond monuments erected over a 130-year period to explain how these two seemingly different moments obscure the historical continuities of racial politics in Richmond. I argue these monuments, even the contemporary antiracist ones, symbolically and discursively help maintain inequitable racial regimes. Just as the Robert E. Lee statue did in 1890, they work to mask the ineffectiveness of the city’s urban regime in solving social ills, help respond to threats to hegemonic power, support elite political influence, manage the city’s reputation, and help promote economic development over the improvement of residents’ social conditions. Richmond’s racial politics repeat over time because they function within historical traditions and systems of oligarchic power which have structurally and ideologically constrained Richmond’s political possibilities and imaginary. They supplant moral imagination with racial imagination. I use a qualitative, comparative-historical research design to uncover the social histories and public debates regarding the Lee monument in 1890, the Arthur Ashe statue unveiled in 1996 on Richmond’s formerly Confederate-lined Monument Avenue, Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War responding to the Confederate statuary, and Lee again in 2020, but covered in graffiti. Using newspaper data and images, I examine how the long arc of racial politics are sustained within Richmond’s attempts to manage its reputation in conformity with racial norms and neoliberal economic agendas. I additionally situate these monuments within the racial politics of their period and compare them to a contemporaneous city development project which illustrates the strategies pursued by urban regimes to negotiate constraints and opportunities presented by shifting racial politics and economic pressures. I employ a framework incorporating perspectives from race scholarship and urban sociology, explaining how urban regimes consolidate power into racial regimes, use cultural and racial norms to make pro-growth strategies politically valid and legitimate, and contribute to racial colorblindness. This dissertation intervenes in literature on the ideological and symbolic legitimation of racial politics and urban regimes.

Please join us on Zoom: https://to.gmu.edu/OchsDefense