RICHMOND — Every time he walks across historic Capitol Square, state Sen. Adam Ebbin (D-Alexandria) is bothered by the juxtaposition: A monument to Virginia civil rights icons stands in line with three statues of Confederate Civil War figures gazing grandly toward the state Capitol.
Now that he is preparing to step down after 22 years in the legislature to join the administration of Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D), Ebbin wants to do something about that issue. He has introduced a bill to remove the three Confederate statuesand put them in storage.
“We bring schoolchildren in here. And how do we explain to them that there’s a statue of a Confederate general who returned people to slavery?” Ebbin said in an interview, referring to a figure of Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, who captured Harpers Ferry early in the Civil War and sent thousands of Black refugees back into bondage. “I’d like to leave Capitol Square better than when I got here by removing those monuments.”
It’s not clear whether Ebbin will achieve his goal before leaving office Feb. 18 to become senior adviser to the state Cannabis Control Authority; the bill must find funding and get committee approval before going to the full Senate. And like every debate about Confederate statues in Virginia, it will stir strong feelings.
“We can’t learn from history if we continue to erase it,” Sen. William M. Stanley Jr. (R-Franklin) said. “I have no problem with adding [memorials] to the history that’s on this Capitol. I am just continuously disturbed when we subtract from it.”
A spokeswoman for Spanberger said the governor has not had a chance to review the legislation or take a position on it.
The three Confederates are the last major remnants of an army of monuments that once glorified Richmond’s role as the capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War. With the racial reckoning that took place after George Floyd was murdered by police in Minnesota in 2020, state and city officials took down roughly two dozen Confederate monuments around Richmond in the past six years.
Gone are other statues of Jackson and fellow generals J.E.B. Stuart and A.P. Hill — dethroned from busy traffic circles (and in Hill’s case, his remains disinterred from beneath the granite pedestal and moved to a family cemetery). A 60-foot heroic figure of Gen. Robert E. Lee on horsebackcame down from state property on Monument Avenue, one of the grandest residential promenades in the South.
Workers took a collection of busts and statues out of the Capitol itself late one night in 2020, the efforts cloaked in darkness to guard against vandalism and threats of violence. A statue of Lee that had represented Virginia in the U.S. Capitol came down in 2020 and was replaced in December with one of Barbara Johns, whose teenage protests against conditions at her Black high school in Farmville was a major part of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation.
But somehow, despite ongoing efforts to recast the way Richmond presents its complicated history, the three statues on the hallowed ground of Capitol Square remain. Democratic officials who spearheaded the removal of other statues have said in interviews that jurisdiction over Capitol Square is more complicated, with actions requiring approval of the General Assembly, and that their efforts in 2020 essentially ran out of time before Republicans, who had no interest in statue removal, came to power.
The three remaining statues are of:
- Jackson, the former instructor at the Virginia Military Institute who became Lee’s top general but died after a friendly-fire accident during the war. While lionized for his military skills, Jackson was a lifelong defender of slavery and believed it was ordained by God.
- Gov. William “Extra Billy” Smith, who served as governor both in the 1840s and again at the end of the Civil War. He was also a Confederate general who owned enslaved people. He got his nickname in the 1820s when he added extra routes to the mail delivery contract he had with the U.S. government so he could earn extra fees.
- Dr. Hunter Holmes McGuire was a Confederate soldier and physician for the Southern army who amputated Jackson’s arm after that friendly-fire incident. He was a founder of a medical school that’s now part of Virginia Commonwealth University. McGuire, who died at the turn of the 20th century, supported slavery all his life and believed Black people were inferior to Whites.
Ebbin has estimated that removing the statues and putting them into storage would cost roughly $150,000, which is why the Senate Rules committee on Friday referred the bill to the Finance committee so members can debate the budgetary impact.
“Virginia has always been slow to change and get things done. But we are in the 21st century, and I’m hoping we can all agree on this,” Ebbin said in an interview.
Whether the statues come down now or not, Ebbin believes their days are numbered. But either way, Capitol Square will continue to broaden the types of Virginians honored there. In recent years, memorials have gone up to women and Native tribes. A statue of Harry Flood Byrd, the former governor and U.S. senator who spearheaded the Massive Resistance movement against school integration, was removed in 2021.
And soon, a commission that counts Stanley and Ebbin as members is expected to recommend a new statue on the square to take Byrd’s place: one that honors Black Virginia educator and author Booker T. Washington.
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