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Listen: On Monuments, Race and Reconciliation in Richmond

Steve Helber
/
AP

  

In Richmond this weekend a small Confederate heritage rally brought out hundreds of counter protesters. While there were plenty of shouting matches and chanting, many Richmond residents watched more quietly, thinking long and hard about Confederate monuments in their city.

 

Gary Pegeas

 

I don’t particularly like what they stand for, but they’ve been up for so long I don’t see the need to go through all this to take them down. Just move on, ya know.

It was always being talked about, but, real subtle like. But now it’s in the open. People beginning to express how they feel about it. And that’s the beginning of change. You gotta go through some pain in order to get through change. Of course it’s painful, it’s probably going to get more painful before it gets better. Like I said this is just the beginning. The beginning of something good.

Edward Perry

 

Perry.mp3

I’ve been by these statutes a zillion times. You know what Stuart circle meant to me? It was just Stuart circle, it was just a statue. But then all this hoopla, I went and took pictures of all of them. I noticed the architect on all of them, it’s real nice artwork. So they were just statues, even as a kid in Charlottesville, like a little kid downtown, it was just a big guy on a big horse. That’s all it was. But this now…. I guess these eventually will come down. I hope not.

In Charlottesville I went to a black high school first and then there was integration and the blacks split up and had to go to two white high schools. I got along with whites, I played football. So some of my buddies that didn’t, they got together and had a top 10 Uncle Tom’s list. You know what an Uncle Tom is? It’s me. Now. Any black person that would back the Confederacy or don’t speak evil of America or white people, that’s it today. You’re a traitor to the race. So I made the top ten Uncle Tom’s list in high school. I think I was number five.

Harrison Hayes

 

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I do a lot of work around the public housing units around Richmond and I can say I’ve been there probably every day just this week and this never came up. People are concerned about how they’re going to make the next month’s rent, where their food is going to come from, whether their child is safe on the street. And it’s just interesting to see that a lot of people are coming out here for something like this when there’s so much of a need in the city in other areas. There’s been multiple killings of young people, teenagers around the city. If this same level of energy could go to something where… the shootings in Gilpin, the shootings in Creighton... What a difference that would make for our city. So that people that live in those areas know that people from all different races, ages, care about them.

And that’s the one thing that I love when I go to a protest like this is that people are from all different races and it’s gorgeous to see, but I just wish they were coming to... I wish it was for another purpose honestly. I wish it was for a purpose that really affects a lot people that grew up around this city and go through generations of poverty and are just struggling to get by. I wish it was to help those people instead of a statue. And to give a voice to these crazy white nationalists who come here from out of town. I don’t think that they deserve this much attention, they really don’t. The folks down the street deserve more attention. The kids that are in these broken schools deserve this amount of attention from the community, and not these people who are not even from here.

 

 

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