The Monuments Working Group was founded by Justin Greenlee, a graduate student in the department of Art History at the University of Virginia, in July 2018 as a protest-based movement that opposed white supremacist groups when they gathered at Confederate sites in Richmond, Virginia. The group was formed a year after the violence of August 11th and 12th in Charlottesville, Virginia, and our shared principles include a commitment to activism, social justice, and ending the racism on display in our cities’ most honored public spaces.
Most of the activities of the Monuments Working Group took place during the 2018/2019 school year, when we pushed for long-overdue interventions in the monumental landscape at the University of Virginia, worked for the removal of every Confederate statue on Monument Avenue in the city of Richmond, and supported alternative forms of commemoration that either acknowledged a history of violence against African Americans living in the cities of Charlottesville and Richmond and/or celebrated the community’s greatest accomplishments.
The Monuments Working Group was supported, financially, by the Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures at the University of Virginia as part of the Graduate Student Public Humanities Lab in 2018/2019. In identifying ourselves as a “working group,” we were purposefully devoted to praxis. This means we had participants and partners, not members, and only insisted on our own institutional shape when it: a) became a way to leverage resources that could be redistributed to ongoing, minority-led initiatives in Charlottesville and Richmond; or b) could be used to tear down the systems and structures that resist change in the monumental and memorial landscape.
The roots of the Monuments Working Group are negative, as we defined ourselves against neo-Confederates, neo-Nazis, and modern-day fascists. But many people also inspired us and gave us something to fight for. Influential individuals and groups are too numerous to name, here, but important partners from 2018/19 included participants in the Graduate Student Public Humanities Lab, historians Jalane Schmidt and Ana Edwards, Phil Wilayto (the editor of the Richmond-based newspaper The Virginia Defender), and anti-racist activist Matthew Christensen. We continue to look for ways to support their ongoing efforts. A summary of work can be found on the Projects page, which also serves as an archive of our efforts.
Image credit: Currier and Ives, The Fall of Richmond, Va. On the Night of April 2d. 1865, lithograph, hand-colored, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (image source).