This story was reported and written by VPM News.
Ideas of how to memorialize and teach American history continue to clash five years after the purge of Confederate statues along Monument Avenue. Many cheered as the statues came down, witnessing a landmark moment that many considered impossible in their lifetime. Others still wish to see them restored.
Two months into his new administration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
Asserting that past administrations had distorted national historical narratives, the president tasked the Department of the Interior to look into restoring monuments, memorials and statues that have been removed since 2020.
Legal experts and analysts say the order is unlikely to revive Richmond’s monuments, as they were local and state property, not under the jurisdiction of the federal government. But the president’s actions signal his willingness to wrest control of cultural institutions and mold American national identity.
“This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light,” the order says. “Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.”
The order also calls on officials to shift Smithsonian Institute museums away from “divisive, race-centered” ideology, just weeks after the Trump administration pulled federal funding from museums, libraries and cultural organizations nationwide.
In line with the order, the Department of Defense last month renamed seven military bases — including three in Virginia — whose names had been changed three years ago to remove their associations with Confederate leaders.
Officials said the restored names would honor different soldiers, effectively working around a law Congress passed in a 2020 bipartisan vote banning base names that honor the Confederacy. Still, the move has been seen as an effort to continue defending its legacy.
“Our memory of the past is not just some academic subject. It's not just something for nerds who like history,” said Rivka Maizlish, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “It really can change the course of who has power in the present. Who we choose to honor and memorialize says a lot about who we are and what direction we're going in.”
More than 300 Confederate monuments removed since 2020
In 2020, then-Gov. Ralph Northam and Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney ordered the removal of the Confederate monuments in Richmond weeks after protests erupted nationwide following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Stoney resisted calls for their removal in 2017, after a violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville resulted in a car attack that killed one person and injured more than 30 others. But momentum behind the Black Lives Matter movement reached a fever pitch with sweltering civil unrest amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential election.
While 2,086 Confederate memorials, markers and monuments remain nationwide, more than 300 have been taken down since then, according to the SPLC’s “Whose Heritage?” map. Maizlish said the recently renamed bases are the only items on the SPLC list that have been restored since Trump’s executive order.
In addition to monuments and military bases, public schools across the country named for Confederate leaders also changed. Ahead of Trump’s reelection last year, however, school division leaders in Shenandoah County voted to restore the names of two schools that had previously honored Confederates.
Maizlish said the recent changes over the last five years are only a blip in the timeline since the Civil War, contending with long-established narratives that romanticize the antebellum South and obscure the truth about how it fought to maintain race-based slavery.
“I think when people express anger or distress at the restoration of Confederate names to military bases or these schools, I would remind them that our work was already cut out for us,” she said. “If we take a long view of history and see this movement against ‘Lost Cause’ mythology as centuries old, this may be just a sort of a small rocky period, and doesn't really represent a massive shift.”
The SPLC started counting the number of Confederate memorials throughout the country in 2015, after white supremacist Dylann Roof gunned down nine people at a historic Black church in South Carolina. Images of the shooter posing with firearms and Confederate symbols led to debates over the display of Confederate flags and monuments in public spaces and institutions.
Though many argue that those symbols are not hateful, historians have long cited comments by Confederate leaders and supporters as evidence of a racist ideology.
A month before the start of the Civil War in 1861, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens said the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy was the “great truth” that Black people are inferior and should be held in slavery as a “natural and normal condition.”
After the war, influential Virginia journalist Edward Pollard continued to defend slavery and white supremacy. He wrote The Lost Cause, a book that upheld righteous views of the Confederacy and gave name to a myth that continues to influence people’s views about the war and slavery.
“The reason the United States has so many Confederate memorials is because of an organized propaganda campaign,” Maizlish said. “Instead of the memory of the Civil War as a struggle between slavery and freedom, it became an unfortunate misunderstanding between two sides that fought with honor. They erased the memory of slavery. They spread the racist lie that slaves were happy and content.”
Bill Martin, executive director of the Valentine museum in Richmond, said positive attitudes about the Confederacy hardened through the 20th century, as public school textbooks and popular culture reinforced the “Lost Cause” mythology over the next century.
“These images you get as a kid become part of who you become,” Martin said. “This is what they read in the newspaper. This was what they saw. This is what they heard in church. This is what they lived in their social lives. And so in many ways, they were not even aware that there was a different story.”
Reactionary politics attempt to harness grievance
Inside the Valentine, the paint-splattered statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis is displayed the same way it looked when protesters toppled him on Monument Avenue five years ago.
Martin says the museum chose to present the statue this way to contextualize its history: It was sculpted in museum namesake Edward Valentine’s workshop on the museum grounds, a century before newly prevailing attitudes about the Confederacy led to its forceful removal.
Such contemporary interpretations of history, however, have sparked a reactionary cultural movement opposed to unflattering depictions of American history.
Chelsea Higgs Wise, a local racial justice activist, said she sees Trump’s comments and orders regarding monuments and the Confederacy as a call to action.
“He knows there was progress made in 2020 and that people see it as a real win,” she said. “He’s inviting those ‘heritage, not hate’ folks to come back and feel empowered to organize.”
As of now, no pro-Confederate heritage group has made any major announcements or efforts to demonstrate or call for their return. Officials at the United Daughters of the Confederacy, whose headquarters is located on Arthur Ashe Boulevard next to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, declined an interview request.
As part of its efforts to dramatically reduce public spending, the Trump administration stripped funding from the federal Institute for Museum and Library Services and laid off 80% of its staff. At the time, the agency posted on social media that it was pulling money for diversity, equity and inclusion programs related to racial justice.
Trump’s “restoring truth and sanity” executive order also gave specific examples of purported transgressions, citing an exhibit about race and sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and proclamations about aspects of “white culture” being related to “hard work” and “individualism” at The National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.
Katy Clune, the state’s chief folklorist at Virginia Humanities — another organization poised to lose federal funding — said stripping resources from organizations involved in historical and cultural research hurts reconciliation efforts.
“I think that we are put at a position of having fewer resources to do the most important work at hand, of knitting together our social fabric,” Clune said. “It's frustrating because we believe we're doing the good work of knitting communities back together in conversation, to consider what we want our futures to look like.”
The future of Richmond’s history
Besides the Davis statue, the two dozen or so other monuments that Virginia and Richmond removed remain stored away without immediate plans for disposal or recontextualization.
In 2022, shortly before Northam, a Democrat, left office at the end of his term as governor, the state and city conveyed its monuments to the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia.
Government officials a year before discussed plans to earmark $11 million and convene community groups to solicit new ideas to “reimagine” Monument Avenue. But those efforts dissipated at the outset of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration.
In an email to VPM News, the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia declined an interview request, but said Trump’s executive order does not “impose any obligations” to display or return the monuments.
“In recognition of both the historic relevance of the monuments and the impact of their presence on the community, the museum’s leadership is taking great care to be as thoughtful as possible about next steps to ensure the future use of the monuments facilitates healing and reconciliation across the country,” said Executive Director Shakia Gullette Warren.
With or without monuments — or previously allocated resources from the federal government — historians and scholars will continue doing their best to honestly represent the full breadth of history they examine, said Martin, the Valentine director.
“I think that museums are dedicated to this mission of telling full stories and using primary sources,” he said. “Yes, there are strange political pressures. But at the end of the day, these institutions are all dedicated and committed to that same notion, that same commitment, no matter what the politics are.”
Disclosure: The Valentine Museum is a VPM donor. From July 2024 through May 2025, The Valentine also hosted an exhibit on the 40-year photo archive of Style Weekly, which is owned by VPM Media Corporation.
Copyright 2025 VPM