Richmond is the city of Monument Avenue and Jackson Ward, the Lost Cause and the Civil Rights struggle. It is, in short, a city with many histories. Richmonders have often presented their city as a place where visitors can travel back into the past. The “Old Virginia capitol of Richmond…offers you escape, not only in miles but in time!,” declared a city guidebook of 1947.
The postcards assembled here illustrate how, for most the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Richmond mattered as the city of the founding fathers. Postcards reproduced images of George Washington’s statue on the grounds of Jefferson’s capitol and St. John’s Church, where Patrick Henry demanded “Give me Liberty or Give me Death.” At the same time, the city glorified its Confederate heroes. One popular postcard depicted 600 white schoolchildren assembled as a human Dixie flag on the steps of the Robert E. Lee Monument.
At the end of the twentieth century, the statue of African American, barrier-breaking, tennis great Arthur Ashe appeared on Richmond postcards. But the darker history of slavery and the slave trade has proved more difficult to represent. Today we ask, can the city of history be a place of reckoning and reconciliation as well as escape?