Multiple legal battles have complicated Governor Ralph Northam’s plan to remove the Lee monument in Richmond. In the meantime, the community there has reclaimed the space. Each night the monument is lit up, the pedestal is covered with layers of paint, and around the base there’s a memorial to black lives.
For more than 50 years Howard Hopkins has driven past the Lee Monument downtown on his way to work each day. And yet, until the day I met him, he’s never stopped.
“First time I’ve stepped on the grounds of it. I had no desire to first of all, and secondly I didn’t...I never read whether you were prohibited from coming on these grounds,” he said. “I just never took time.”
But he’s taking the time now. And it’s making him think about his own life. He grew up in North Carolina where his father was a sharecropper. Held hostage to the landowner, in a cycle of debt.
“At the end of the season it was never enough. Because they had the store they kept the books and at the end they said ‘Mr. Joe you did pretty good this year but you didn’t quite make it,’.”
Eventually his mother took the children and left, prompting his father to finally follow. He remembers his own first encounter with racial prejudice. He was too young to read and mistakenly used a water fountain labeled for white people.
“So this little lady came by and grabbed me by my shirt like this, and she walked me over and she said this is your water fountain,” Hopkins remembers. So began a lifetime of similar experiences.
These are the memories fresh in his head: moving to Richmond in 1968 to work in the city’s segregated public schools, sending his children to a high school named for Robert E. Lee.
Now standing before a monument to that same man, even with its new layer of decoration, is painful.
“The greatest pain is that we had to get to this stage in order for someone to make a decision that this is wrong. This is on the wrong side of history,” Hopkins said. “This is long overdue. Long overdue. There are no people in the world that are lesser than anybody by the standards of God.”
Before he leaves Howard Hopkins asks a stranger to take a photo of him in front of the statue. He plans to give the photo to his great grandson. He hopes his grandson will read about this in the history books.
“He’ll probably have that picture one day when I’m dead and he can look at it and say there’s my great grandfather… standing in front of that statue.”
Critics say removing this and other Confederate monuments erases our history. But Hopkins says we’re simply writing the next chapter.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
