Lee Chapel - Davis

In visiting the Lee chapel memorial, I expected for the tour to center around the recent conflict which ended with the removal of the confederate flags from Robert E. Lee’s statue. It is quite common for a memorial space to be a center of conflict because different people have vastly different opinions regarding how they believe that specific events or people should be remembered. In the case of Lee chapel, the controversy centered around the flags which flanked the Robert E. Lee statue and the different interpretations of what these flags represented.

 While the curator went into detail about the backlash from the controversy, she shied away from speaking directly about what the conflict itself was. It seemed as though that bit of history surrounding the memorial was not the story which she wanted to tell. In fact, she gleefully stated that they had a brick worker come in to hide the holes in the walls from which the flags once hung. In this moment, she relished in their ability to erase the presence of the conflict from the memorial site.

After viewing the memorial space on the main level of the chapel, we went downstairs to explore the museum. The museum contained many of Lee’s belongings as well as heirlooms from the early years of Washington and Lee. Interestingly, the museum space did not contain any reference to the fact that the school owned slaves. Just as the holes in the walls were removed, so was the memory of the Washington and Lee slave population. It became clear that the memorial sought to focus on the positive aspect of the school, as well as Lee’s life, and made a concerted effort to hide any negative associations.