Building a Bridge of Lament
Memorial Bridge is a quarter mile-long viaduct across the James River, linking rural Piedmont counties to the city of Lynchburg, Virginia. As you cross the bridge and enter the city from the northern bank, two hundred and fifty years of Lynchburg skyline spread across the horizon. Looking down, you see the previous bridge’s abutment protruding above the water’s surface and realize this bridge is only the most recent iteration of many crossings on the river. John Lynch, for whom the bridge is named, established the original crossing in 1757 as a ferry service. It didn’t take long for the little village called Lynch’s Ferry to grow into a town, and soon the river turned from barrier to profit as it carried tobacco to market from the warehouses of the growing town, now the city of Lynchburg.
On the skyline above the crossing, the old courthouse sits small but prominent, behind the commercial high-rises, and between the historic spires. For a time in the city’s history, the courthouse bell rang every night, accompanying the close of the day’s business and announcing curfew for all the Black residents, both enslaved and free — an audible reminder of who profited in this place and who met a barrier.
Crossing the bridge and ascending toward the courthouse brings you to Monument Terrace. The 139 stairs rise through landings with sculptures, plaques, and monuments honoring fallen soldiers in every major American war. At the top of the steps, the focal point of the climbing terraces, a Confederate soldier stands proudly gazing south past the bell the city fathers once rang. The Daughters of the Confederacy erected the statue, titled “Our Confederate Soldiers,” in 1899.
Memorializing events and people of the past gives purpose to the present. What values does this Confederate soldier reflect? What is the effect of remembering white soldiers and intentionally forgetting the Black men and women the Civil War was conducted to keep enslaved? Who is included and who is left out of the word “Our”? Just a couple years after Our Confederate Soldiers stood upright in front of the courthouse, Lynchburg instituted the poll tax to disenfranchise Black voters. As Lynchburg’s Virginia State Senator Carter Glass explained it, the goal was “to remove every [African American] voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate.”1 Like the curfew bell, the poll tax was another barrier imposed by white supremacy.
The term “white supremacy” may evoke uncomfortable or uncertain feelings in white readers. Many confine the concept to explicit extremism — white hoods and burning crosses — but authors Duke Kwon and Greg Thompson define it more broadly as the “social supremacy of people characterized as White.”2 It is promotion and valuation of white identity above non-white identity, whether consciously or subconsciously, by economic, political, and social means. As with many caste systems, this social promotion is often invisible to the beneficiary group itself. Yes, white supremacy included “its embodiment, slavery,” but its legacy also endures through modern times.
What is the effect of remembering white soldiers and intentionally forgetting the Black men and women the Civil War was conducted to keep enslaved? Who is included and who is left out of the word “Our”?
The city of Lynchburg named its latest bridge after John Lynch to remember our forebears and reflect their values of pioneerism, commerce, and progress. Local African Americans know the barriers to those values, and they know that John Lynch, while manumitting his slaves according to the conscience of his Quaker faith, also promoted sending them back to Africa. A proper crossing of his bridge exposes not only the barriers of white supremacy that the Black community here has always known, but also the exclusion and removal that have come with it. Another bridge, that of awareness and lament, is needed to carry the white community over its barrier of ambivalence to white supremacy.
A good place to begin that crossing is Juneteenth, marking the day in June 1865 when word came to the enslaved, in Galveston, Texas, that they were free. History remembers these Black men and women as among the last liberated people of the country, two months after General Lee’s surrender just outside of Lynchburg, in Appomattox. Our project is to build a bridge, starting on Juneteenth — a day that wasn’t in the consciousness of most white Americans until recently — and ending on July 4th, the day we celebrate our nation’s love for freedom and independence.
To span the immense river of history and the barriers of modern ambivalence, this bridge must necessarily hold both lament and celebration. And it must be a bridge that those living in and around Lynchburg can traverse together; there is healing in that, and perhaps even hope for redress. May our written words, markers, and icons in this space properly focus our minds' eye and carry us across to the best principles of our city and state’s founding: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and safety3 — not only for ourselves, but for each other.
Author’s note: This post is longer than most June 19th-July 4th daily readings will be. Our hope is to ground you in the local vision for the project as we remember, lament, and seek renewal over the history and legacy of racism in Lynchburg, Virginia.
Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair, Brazos Press, 2021. Pg 60-61.