City Needs to Discuss Monuments

In a statement released by Lynchburg Mayor Treney Tweedy on June 4, Tweedy uses the Lynchburg Museum’s “Five Forks Battle Flag: A Community Perspective” exhibit from January of this year as crutch to deflect from addressing the monument question, which last week took another turn in Virginia with the removal of a Confederate monument in Alexandria, and the coming removal of the Robert E. Lee Monument in Richmond. Tweedy claims that because the museum undertook the exhibit — despite its limited community involvement in the form of moderated conversation, lectures, attendance or public programming (of which there was none, as directed by city leadership) — in her view, “right now, we have too many other concerns to worry about pieces of concrete and steel.”

Although it may seem a safer path for the city to continue to kick the can down the road by stifling public engagement around hard topics such as what to do with Confederate monuments, in the long run, the city is only hurting itself. There is a direct connection between the history of monuments and the way the city looks and functions today — for both black and white people. The time is long overdue for Lynchburg to get serious about the relevancy and complexity of this history.

LAURA A. MACALUSO

Lynchburg