The streets and cemeteries of Richmond, Virginia, are still lined with massive memorials to the Confederacy and flags with the “Southern cross.” Residents of the historic city said to this day it is hard for them to move past that history.

“Being the former capital of the Confederacy we are steeped in the history, but it’s all one-sided. It’s all a lost cause history and until it’s balanced it’s not going to be made right,” said Anita Lee, a resident of Richmond. “It needs to be a more balanced history.”

Local and national programs have developed in recent years to combat hate against African-Americans, racism in general and an American history of intolerance. In Richmond, two women started a pledge and program at their Unitarian Universalist church to educate people on racism.

Unitarian Universalist churches are known for filling their congregations with predominantly white members and leaders. Last year, the church saw national furor over racial policies and practices, sparking a resignation of its national president, after the appointment of what critics saw as too many white leaders.

Lee, 70, said she has been fighting against hate and racism since her father put her on a picket line when she was only 8 years old, protesting to integrate schools. When she joined the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Richmond about 20 years ago, Lee said people would often confuse her with the black secretary for the church, even though she came to service every week and “looked nothing like her.”

That experience was one of many that launched the Richmond Pledge Against Racism, a program led by two women in the local church with two days of workshops and training discussing hate.

Since the idea came to fruition four years ago, about 250 people have completed the training in Richmond and the program has now launched in 17 locations across America.

“It was important to me if I was going to remain a member of the church that we become really active in eradicating racism, and signing the pledge was only the beginning,” Lee said. “We had to learn to live the pledge. And so we developed a series of workshops in order to enable people to learn how to first recognize racism when they see it and then what to do about it.”

Lee started the program with Annette Marquis, who grew up in a town that was “intentionally white.” Marquis grew up in Roger, Arkansas – which was classified as a sundown town, meaning that signs were posted across the town saying that blacks were not allowed after dark.

There were thousands of sundown towns across America before the Civil Rights era, according to Jim Loewen, author of the book “Sundown Towns.” Loewen uses a formula to identify towns as sundown, including if there was legislature preventing blacks from the town, documented signage and a white population of more than 99.9 percent.

“The sense of being threatened by just being in a place, by just having made a turn through a town, that people weren’t welcome – that has really stayed with me all my life,” Marquis said.

The two women started the program in 2014 after the first Black Lives Matter rally in Richmond. Marquis said a number of the church members went to the march and then started to think about what they could do to combat racism and hate in America, asking themselves the question “how do we really find ourselves in this story?”

Marquis said she doesn’t see the national conversation changing until more communities confront what’s going on in their neighborhoods.

“When you really look at the history of this country, there has been no justice for people of color,” she said. “From Jamestown to Plymouth Rock to everywhere in between and today, when I hear that, when I hear the rhetoric around making America great again and I try to think about when was that time that we’re trying to make great again. There was never a time when it was great for people of color.”

After the alt-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last year in the city neighboring Richmond that left one dead and several injured, Lee said she has no choice but to continue to fight against hate.

“I have five grandchildren and I’ve been working at this for let’s just say well over 50 years. I see us sliding backwards and I want their lives to be better,” Lee said. “I don’t want them to have to be fighting when they get old enough for equal rights, it doesn’t make any sense. This is 2018 for heaven’s sakes. I never imagined that we’d still be fighting racism.”

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About a month after the mass shooting, the Confederate flag was removed from the South Carolina Capitol, sparking a statewide and national debate to remove statues, flags and symbols of the Confederacy.

Three years later, the momentum has continued.

Local and state governments have removed at least 110 Confederate tributes and monuments since the 2015 attack in Charleston, according to an analysis published by the Southern Poverty Law Center this month. More than 1,700 symbols remain around the U.S., with many protected by state laws in former Confederate states, the report found.

“The conscience of the nation was pricked by that event,” Lecia Brooks, director of outreach at SPLC, said of the Charleston shooting. “It is time for us to have an honest conversation about what these monuments and memorials represent — it is not about heritage, it is about hate.”

The report found that there are currently 772 monuments in 23 states and Washington, D.C., with more than 300 in Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina. There are 100 public schools named for Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis or other Confederate figures and 80 counties and cities named after Confederate leaders, according to the report.

Brooks said SPLC did a national sweep to see the scope of the remaining Confederate monuments and collected data using online resources and contacts across the country.

Monuments and symbols should not be in public spaces because of what they represent and their removals are “past due,” she said.

“The memorials and monuments themselves and honoring of the veterans of the Confederate war were born out of white supremacy so it is a way to reinforce it and remind people, especially people of color and African-Americans in particular, that white supremacy reined,” Brooks said.

Activists pushing to remove these symbols and statues agree with the SPLC, while opponents argue that removing them erases history. Experts and historians that spoke to News 21 represented the divided opinions on the topic.

Ilya Somin, a professor of law at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, said there might be some areas where you can display them for historical purposes, but they should be removed from places of honor and public spaces.

SPLC excluded thousands of memorials located in historical settings, such as museums, battlefields and cemeteries, from its report.

“As a general rule, I think the government should not be honoring people whose main claim to fame is that they were in defense of slavery,” Somin said.

The removals since the Charleston massacre include 47 monuments and four flags, as well as name changes for 37 schools, seven roads, three buildings and seven parks, according to the SPLC report. Eighty-two removals were in former Confederate states with Texas leading the way with 31 removed, followed by 14 removed in Virginia.

But the removals have not been without controversy.

Last year in Charlottesville, Virginia, plans to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s top general, triggered the Unite the Right rally where white nationalists stormed the college town with torches to protest the statue’s removal, and a rally left one person dead and dozens injured.  Federal hate crime charges were filed June 27 against an Ohio man accused of plowing his car into the counter-protesters.

Some have argued that violent protests will continue as monuments of the Confederacy are taken down. But Somin said that shouldn’t have any impact on the decision to remove them.

“If we do allow violent people to have a veto, that just encourages more violence — not only by neo-Confederates, but by extremist groups of all kinds, both right and left, who if they see that you can get your way by threatening violence then that just encourages more people to do it,” he said.

The report also names monument sponsors, including the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which has erected hundreds of statues since the Civil War.

United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of the Confederate Veterans did not respond to requests to comment for this story. A 2016 report by the SPLC said construction of monuments increased from 1900 through the 1920s, during the period of Jim Crow laws, and again in the 1950s-60s, during the civil rights movement.

Michele Bogart, a social history professor of public art, urban design and commercial culture at Stony Brook University in New York, said these monuments should not be removed because there is no inherent reason why people should assume that a monument, which she calls a historical artifact, is “a validation or celebration” of the Confederacy today.

“If you get rid of the monuments, you’re not going to solve the problem of structural racism in American society,” Bogart said. “You lose a sense of place and individual character and you lose a lot of local memory that is embodied in these works.”

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