As of this year, the historic thoroughfare in Richmond, Virginia, previously known as, simply, the Boulevard, is Arthur Ashe Boulevard. During a ceremony on June 22, mayor Levar Stoney said the renaming was a sign the city was “parting with our darker past and embracing our brighter future.” Ashe’s surviving family joined Stoney to honor the Richmond native, who helped break the de facto color line in professional tennis and then became an advocate for HIV/AIDS awareness (having contracted HIV during a blood transfusion and eventually dying from related complications). The ceremony was widely seen as an important step forward from Richmond’s Confederate and Jim Crow–era past.
Arthur Ashe Boulevard extends from Byrd Park, where Ashe would not have been allowed to play as a child, to Interstate 95, which divides the black Northside neighborhood from the quickly gentrifying western end of the city. Driving that route on a Sunday afternoon, you might pass the Confederate “flaggers” in front of the Virginia Fine Arts Museum, who protest the museum’s removal of a Confederate flag by waving their own. You’ll also see the 37-foot-tall Stonewall Jackson statue at the intersection with Monument Avenue. Renaming the boulevard after Ashe was so hotly contested that it took three attempts in as many decades, plus a political scandal, for it to finally become a reality.1
Protestors in front of the VFAM in April 2019, along what is now Arthur Boulevard. Photo by Kayla Meyers.
Transportation routes have long been sites where race was negotiated in Virginia. Richmond, “The River City,” rests on the James River—one of the most important trade routes in the early republic, including the slave trade. The first enslaved people in British North America were unloaded on the banks of the James in 1619, and the river saw similar shipments for the next two centuries, from Jamestown up to Richmond (north of which the James is a white-water impasse). When the international slave trade was abolished in 1808, the domestic slave trade boomed and became one of the most profitable industries in Virginia, with Richmond as the epicenter, sending hundreds of thousands of enslaved people to the cotton plantations further south.
During this time Richmond’s Shockoe Bottom, a district extending uphill from Shockoe Slip to the capitol building, became a financial and social hub. Its eight blocks were lined with auction houses, factories, shipping centers, and jails, all of them reaping profits from the slave trade. The district was also home to a small but robust free black population.2
After the Civil War, many black Richmonders moved from Shockoe Bottom to Jackson Ward, just north of downtown. By the 1920s, Jackson Ward was a bustling center of black entertainment and commerce. Jazz legends Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald frequented “The Deuce,” a section of Second Street dotted with restaurants and nightclubs. The First Reformers Bank was established as the first black-owned bank in the U.S, and by 1930 the city had five black-owned banks. Despite its importance as a financial and cultural center, white Richmond remained hostile to the neighborhood and excluded black businesses from participating in the rest of the city’s commerce. Nonetheless, the Jackson Ward district flourished, and it was dubbed the Harlem of the South.
The district entered economic decline with white flight; after all, despite the hostility white Richmonders had towards Jackson Ward, plenty of them had patronized its jazz clubs. This was compounded, however, by I-95, which dealt Jackson Ward a crippling blow.
It is no secret that, during the mid-twentieth century, state agencies used the construction of interstate highways to pursue racist policies and devastate black neighborhoods. From New York to Miami, highway planners sought black neighborhoods not only because their property value was cheaper, but also because residents lacked the political sway to stop the bulldozers. The fate of Richmond’s Jackson Ward was no different. In 1953, the city issued an investigative report to determine what should be done with “Richmond’s slums.” The report unsurprisingly determined that there was no use in diverting resources for rebuilding the neighborhood and instead favored routing the proposed Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike (later I-95) through Jackson Ward. 3
I-95 now bisects Jackson Ward and shoots south through Shockoe Bottom. Like many other U.S. cities, the interstate highway system profoundly affected Richmond’s commerce and economic vitality. As white people fled the city, displaced black residents could move into new neighborhoods, but they were still held in an economic stranglehold and barred from many jobs. The resulting concentration of poverty had innumerable effects on the well-being of residents and the city’s economic viability.4
Since the 1990s, the city attempted to reverse the destruction of black Richmond. In 1998, the city council established the Slave Trail Commission, which planned and marked a commemorative walking trail from the James River to Lumpkin’s Slave Jail.
Richmond Slave Trail Commission brochure.
I went on a field trip to Lumpkin’s with some high school students in 2017, and as we emerged from under the overpass onto the Lumpkin’s site, one of the students asked, “Where is the museum?” There wasn’t, and isn’t, any.
Lumpkin’s illustrates the confusion that arises when preserving entire historic districts instead of specific sites. Part of the historic jail complex was already destroyed by the construction of the highway; the remainder was a parking lot. Now that the city has removed the asphalt and demarcated the site (a three-million-dollar project), Lumpkin’s sits as a patch of grass along I-95.5
In 2013, then-mayor Dwight Jones proposed a “Revitalize RVA” development plan. The goal was to generate jobs by transforming Shockoe into an entertainment district, complete with a new stadium for Richmond’s Flying Squirrels minor-league baseball team. But the proposal set off a grueling political battle, with “No Stadium” signs erected on many Richmond lawns.
Rendering of the Revitalize RVA plan.
Though the plan included a slavery heritage museum that was endorsed by the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia, the optics of the proposal led many to denounce the project. The promise of much-needed development for an economically depressed area did not erase the fact that the city aimed to build an entertainment district on the same land where human beings were once bought and sold. Later in 2013, local residents proposed a different plan that replaced the stadium with a contemplative memorial park. Neither proposal, however, was put into action.6
Monument Avenue, c. 1907 (Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries).
Today the city similarly wrestles with its past along Monument Avenue, where between 1890 and 1929 the city erected (often relying on the cheap labor of black Virginians) statues of Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and Confederate Navy Commander Matthew F. Maury. At the same time I-95 was cleaving Jackson Ward, Monument Avenue’s property values were skyrocketing; its historic homes are frequently listed with seven-digit prices.7
Calls to remove the statues have grown louder and the resistance more entrenched. When the city prepared to host the 2015 UCI Road World cycling championship, Confederate flag wavers and Black Lives Matter protesters frequently met at the base of Monument Avenue’s Jefferson Davis statue, the u-turn point for competing cyclists. After the deadly 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Mayor Levar Stoney appointed a Monument Avenue Commission for guidance on how to recontextualize the statues. By fall 2018, the commission recommended removing the Davis statue and erecting signage to reinterpret the four other Confederate statues. Stoney said he would review the recommendations, but no changes have yet been made.8
Protesters at the January 2017 March on Monument Avenue, holding an imitation historical marker detailing the political actions that led to the approval and construction of the Robert E. Lee statue. Photo courtesy of Joey Wharton.
Instead of removing or altering monuments of Confederate significance, the city decided to add ones celebrating black heritage. This began in 1996 with the unveiling of an Arthur Ashe sculpture on Monument Avenue, and was followed by the erection of statues in Jackson Ward honoring Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and (in 2017) Maggie L. Walker, the first woman to charter a bank in the United States. Just days before the commemoration of Arthur Ashe Boulevard, the Virginia Fine Arts Museum announced its acquisition of Kehinde Wiley’s sculpture, “Rumors of War.” The artist, known for portraying people of color using classical conventions, modeled his sculpture after the Monument Avenue statue of Confederate general, J.E.B Stuart. It will be installed at the entrance of the fine arts museum, located on Arthur Ashe Boulevard, in December. 9
All of these efforts, including the designation of Arthur Ashe Boulevard, are essential and long overdue. But they can also been seen as mere adornments to a racist infrastructure that needs to be overhauled, if not torn down. There are still many roads for Richmond to take.
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- Mark Robinson, “Richmond City Council Renames Boulevard for Arthur Ashe,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, Feb. 11, 2019.
- Meghan Drueding, “The Underground Legacy of Shockoe Bottom in Richmond, Virginia,” Saving Places, July 14, 2014. Also see Gregg D. Kimball, American City, Southern Place: A Cultural History of Antebellum Richmond (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000); and James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730–1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
- Alana Semuels, “The Role of Highways in American Poverty,” The Atlantic, March 18, 2016; Mark T. Evans, “Main Street, America: Histories of I-95” (PhD diss., University of South Carolina, 2015), 193–95, 198–99, 212. Evans does not include Jackson Ward in his list of black neighborhoods decimated by I-95, because white flight had already left Jackson Ward in economic decline. But I maintain the case can be made, using Evans’s evidence, that I-95 was a contributing factor to the neighborhood’s decline.
- Hamilton Lombard, “Richmond’s Quiet Transformation,” Stat Chat, April 7, 2015.
- Abigail Tucker, “Digging up the Past at a Richmond Jail,” Smithsonian Magazine (March 2009).
- Susan Svrluga, “As Richmond Mulls Over a Slavery Heritage Site, Supporter of Stalled Museum Speaks Up,” Washington Post, March 21, 2014; Vicky Gan, “America’s Failure to Preserve Historic Slave Markets,” City Lab, Feb. 13, 2015; Graham Moomaw, “Shockoe Ballpark Critics Offer a Different Plan,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, Jan. 1, 2014.
- “Monument Avenue Historic District,” National Park Service, accessed July 12, 2019.
- Tina Griego, “Past and Present: The Many-Sided History of the Monument Avenue Debate,” Richmond Magazine, June 25, 2015; Mark Robinson, “Monument Avenue Commission: Remove Jefferson Davis Statue, Reinterpret Others Honoring Confederacy,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 2, 2018.
- Vanessa Remmers, “Maggie Walker Statue Unveiled Saturday in Richmond,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 15, 2017; “Artist Kehinde Wiley to unveil monumental public sculpture in Times Square, New York, to be permanently installed at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts,” VMFA Press Room, June 20, 2019.
