Arthur Ashe monument

The Arthur Ashe Monument is a bronze sculpture by Paul DiPasquale installed along Richmond, Virginia's Monument Avenue. The statue depicts tennis player Arthur Ashe, who was born and raised in Richmond. The statue is situated on a 16-foot granite pedestal on a traffic island, at the intersection of Monument Avenue and Roseneath Road. The 12-foot tall bronze sculpture depicts Arthur Ashe holding a tennis racket in one hand and books in the other, surrounded by children. The books are raised higher than the tennis racket; this was requested by Ashe himself, as he tended to emphasize education over sports. Ashe's depiction faces west and the children face east. At the time of the statue's construction, Monument Avenue had statues of several Generals of the Confederate States Army, as well as Confederate States Navy Commander Matthew Fontaine Maury and Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Among tallest were the Robert E. Lee Monument, which stood 21 feet tall atop a 40-foot pedestal, and the Davis Memorial, which sat on a 65-foot column. The monuments, constructed from 1890 to 1929, were likely influenced by the then-popular belief that the Confederacy was just and heroic, an ideology also referred to as the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. On July 1, 2020, amid the George Floyd protests, Mayor Levar Stoney ordered all statues to Confederate generals on city property taken down; as a result, the only statue remaining on Monument Avenue is that of Ashe. On July 16, the pedestal of the monument was vandalized with spray paint reading White Lives Matter and WLM. A man claiming to be the vandal spoke to passers-by, saying You put it on our statues, I'll put it on yours. Ashe's family gave the city of Richmond permission to remove the statue if this was needed to protect it from further harm; this was initially misreported as a request to remove the statue.[