Shortly after 9 a.m. on Monday, June 8, several dozen men and women walked into The Haven, a nonprofit multi-resource day shelter and homeless support center in downtown Charlottesville. Sunlight streamed through the facility’s stained-glass windows, casting a warm glow as the center’s frequent guests greeted the staff, volunteers, and one another.

Once the guests were seated, all eyes turned to Andrea Douglas, the executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center (JSAAHC). She stood near the front of the historic Gothic-style building, facing rows of polished brown pews. 

Douglas was there to speak to the gathered crowd about the shelter’s former neighbor: the towering statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that stood across the street in Market Street Park from 1924 until its removal in 2021.

Working toward a community-driven revisioning of public spaces

Douglas’ recent visit to The Haven was part of a months-long public outreach initiative designed to give Charlottesville-area residents — particularly members of the Black community and the city’s unhoused population — a voice in the future of the Lee monument.

When the Lee monument was removed, the city of Charlottesville gifted it to JSAAHC, which dismantled and melted the statue into bronze ingots that eventually became part of a massive “Monuments” exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art  in Los Angeles. Once the six-month exhibition ended in early May, Swords Into Plowshares, an organization that formed shortly after the 2021 removal of the city’s Confederate statues, revealed plans for the second phase of its “Recast/Reclaim” initiative.

Stewarded by the JSAAHC, Swords Into Plowshares draws inspiration from the prophetic vision in the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Isaiah, which celebrates turning tools of violence into ones of peace and community-building. SIPS, as the project also is known, seeks to transform the remains of a symbol of white supremacy into a new public art piece that promotes healing and inclusion, according to its website. Much of that art would be found in the city’s public parks, a step that the Charlottesville City Council endorsed during its May 18 meeting according to reporting from Cville Right Now.

Before and since that meeting, JSAAHC’s outreach effort has included several listening and learning sessions across the city, along with an online survey to gather community input for proposals that have been submitted by three design teams. In recent weeks, Douglas has taken her presentation to a diverse cross-section of Charlottesville, including Black professionals who met Thursday evening, May 21, at JSAAHC, community members who met Saturday, May 23, at Visible Records artist studios, and guests at The Haven on June 8.

Connecting with each of those communities reflects JSAAHC’s attempt to create a multi-racial democratic process, said Douglas. “We also want to foreground the voices of descendants to American enslavement as they are inheritors or witness to systemic oppression. The histories that we have uncovered about our civic leisure spaces includes multiple pasts, all of which have implications about citizenship. We want to cast the broadest net possible so that whatever is created is a reflection of a place locally and globally.”

Douglas further emphasized the importance of including Charlottesville’s unhoused population in these conversations, noting their particular relationship to public spaces. “Although they (unhoused community members) often exist on the fringes of such spaces, they possess a deep understanding of how those spaces function,” said Douglas. “The Haven community, in particular, is closely connected to Market Street Park and can offer a valuable perspective to the community engagement process.”

Confronting the myth of the “Lost Cause”

During her June 8 presentation at The Haven, Douglas explained how the Lee monument came to occupy one of Charlottesville’s public parks for so long. Pointing toward an enlarged postcard on her slideshow, she described how the monument’s installation drew massive crowds, including a military contingent from Richmond.

“It was a procession that left the University of Virginia,” Douglas said. “They walked down Main Street. They walked to the park, and then they installed the statue. You can see the crowd there.”

The event played a central role in advancing the “Lost Cause” narrative, Douglas continued. “Central to this mythology was the false claim that the Civil War was fought over states’ rights and secession rather than the preservation of slavery. It also falsely portrayed enslaved African Americans as loyal to their enslavers and sympathetic to the Confederate cause.”

Throughout her presentation, Douglas stressed that the projects seek to acknowledge Charlottesville’s history of segregated public spaces while creating welcoming parks that reflect community values and encourage gathering, dialogue and inclusion.

Douglas also said that the project’s goal of inclusion confronts the legacy of Virginia’s Public Assemblages Act of 1926. Enacted exactly 100 years ago, this law institutionalized segregation by making it illegal for Black and white people to occupy public parks and other public spaces together.

The Lee monument was installed two years before the Public Assemblages Act became law, said Douglas. “It became a legalized moment, so we’re recognizing that by saying this is not just an object that can exist in one place, but the potential is for it to be in several places all at one time. So, as you’re starting to consider which one you like, also consider the fact that they’re not just singular objects in one place. They exist in other parts that intend to then mark histories that are relevant to the way we occupy public space today.”

In place of the statue will be new public art, and three design firms were selected as finalists among 32 applicants to remake the city’s public space.

The first proposal, by landscape architect Walter Hood and Hood Design, centers on a white pine tree in Market Street Park surrounded by a series of 20-foot steel rings engraved with words or symbols generated through community conversations. Initially stacked together as a single sculpture, the rings would later be distributed to locations across the city, including other parks and community gathering spaces.

A second proposal, by MASS Design Group, would transform Market Street Park into  a central gathering space organized around a Baobab tree-inspired bronze structure incorporating handprints collected from community members during an eight-week engagement process. Baobab trees commonly are known as a “Tree of Life.” Elements of the installation would also be placed in other city parks that practiced racial segregation.

The third proposal, by PUSH Studio, would use rammed-earth construction to create large towers and smaller pillars in Market Street and Washington parks, incorporating soil contributed by residents from places meaningful to them. Community members would help build the structures, which would also be the only proposal to reuse both the bronze and granite from the city’s removed monument.

Community members are hopeful and hesitant about plans to reinterpret city’s public spaces

Locally, residents can engage with this history through “Recast/Reclaim,” an exhibition on display at the JSAAHC through June 30. The exhibit features original, never-before-seen photographs documenting the dismantling and melting of the Lee statue. The winning design team tasked with leading the transformation will be officially announced on July 10, marking the five-year anniversary of the day the monument was permanently removed from Market Street Park.

After listening to Douglas’ presentations, several Charlottesville and Albemarle County residents shared their thoughts about the design proposals with Charlottesville Tomorrow.

“Now may be the time for us to put something — I’ll say significantly more meaningful — in that space, said Don Gathers, a community activist and advocate who co-founded a Black Lives Matter organization in Charlottesville.  “My problem is, I’m still not sure what that should look like. Something that would be warm and welcoming and inviting to most people won’t do something that’s good for all. Because ‘all’ would include those who didn’t want the statues taken down in the first place.”

Gathers mainly is glad that people can now go to Market Street Park and not be “subjected to something that seems like they’re being watched — and that there’s no overseer there. The history of the site will be the history of the site and not an individual overlooking the site, which I think is a good thing.”

Maxine Holland attended the May 21 listening session at JSAAHC along with several other community members, and left impressed about what she learned. Holland is a lifelong public schools educator and community servant who co-founded the nonprofit Veterans Committee of Central Virginia in 2015.

“It was a very informative session,” said Holland. “It answered a lot of questions. We left with a better understanding of what the project is about, and it appears that it would benefit the community.”

Kenneth Cartwright, a frequent guest at The Haven who enjoys its daily breakfast, also attended Douglas’ presentation. Cartwright admits he has mixed feelings about how the monument was removed, but also likes the idea of reinterpreting the statue’s remains.

“When I step back and think about it, I do believe what they’re doing now is good,” said Cartwright, a former Greyhound bus driver who encountered health setbacks after experiencing issues with his heart. “I also have some mixed feelings, especially about how the statue was taken down. History is what it is; we can’t change it. If you take the statue down, some people will miss that visible reminder of history. But at the same time, maybe now that it’s gone, more people will actually look into and learn about that part of our history.

“Speaking as a Black man, thinking about slavery and everything tied up in that, I still wonder if it could have been done differently,” Cartwright added. “Maybe the statue should have been moved somewhere else, where people could go if they wanted to learn about it in context.”

Quinn-Michyelle Foxx, who also attended the presentation at The Haven, said he likes Hood Design group’s proposal, which centers on a white pine tree in Market Street Park surrounded by a series of 20-foot steel rings engraved with words or symbols generated through community conversations. 

“I loved the idea of the rings and the circles because I’m someone who always says that ‘the only way you can tell yourself that you fully understand something is if you make a spectrum close to a full circle,’” said Foxx. “Just those rings alone, if you put them anywhere in the city, they’ll be easily identifiable, you know, which makes it cohesive, going back to the one piece. It just stands out.”

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