What's going on with the Maggie Walker statue? - G.
A resolution to support a monument to famed Richmonder Maggie Lena Walker passed unanimously through Richmond City Council in November 2010.
Walker was an educator and is best known for being the first woman to charter and serve as president of a bank in the United States. Her home in the 100 block of E. Leigh Street in Jackson Ward is a federally protected National Historic Site. She was born in Richmond in 1867 and died here in 1934. She is buried in Evergreen Cemetery in the city's East End.
Melvin Jones is a 1971 graduate of Maggie Walker High School and is the president of the Maggie L. Walker Statue Foundation. He has been seeking funding, a design and a location for a statue in her honor for at least 12 years and it was his resolution that passed.
"People like the idea of the statue," Jones said, but a location hasn't been chosen, a design hasn't been submitted and a cost analysis has not been done. "I don't want her to be put away somewhere. It needs to be downtown in Jackson Ward, that's where lived."
Jones likes the showcase of Broad Street, which has been experiencing a revival in the past several years with many new businesses opening and great foot traffic for events like Broad Appetit and First Fridays Artwalk.
"I've got my heart set on Adams and Broad," he said. "That's the ideal showcase for Walker, the way Broad Street is picking up. People would like to see something nice in that area."
A problem with that location is a big beautiful tree in the triangle between the three streets and Jones acknowledged that many people and businesses in the neighborhood have said they don't want it to be cut down.
One way around losing the tree was to close that first block of Brook Road and create a plaza, he said. A plaza would close off four parking spots on Brook, but would essentially create four new ones on Broad. It could also create a more attractive urban space that potentially would be safer when a bus of school children visits Walker's statue, Jones said.
He spoke with city officials in December and was offered other sites around Jackson Ward like Abner Clay Park and the intersection of 2nd and Clay streets. There have also been suggestions of putting the statue on Monument Avenue or at Maggie Walker Governor's School on Lombardy Avenue. Jones opposes all those suggestions.
The above black and white photo from the Richmond Times-Dispatch archives shows the intersection of Broad and Adams streets and Brook Road in 1957. The triangle was paved as part of the road back then, and the photo shows a fountain or horse trough, which was may be the same one behind the Bill "Bojangles" Robinson statue at Leigh and Adams streets.
"Everybody loves the tree," said Kevin Korda of Renovation Resources Showroom, which opens up to Broad and Brook and has a clear view of the tree.
"As far as creating a plaza, I'm waiting to see what they propose," he said. Removing the tree for a statue would not be his preference.
But do we need a statue to Walker?
"Certainly Maggie Walker was a force...A statue of Maggie Walker would be nice, but I think that her house and her works preserved the way that they are at the [Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia] is really probably sufficient," said architectural historian Selden Richardson on the Open Source radio show. He wrote the book “Built by Blacks” and is an expert on Richmond's African-American history.
He suggested that John Mitchell Jr. (1863-1929) would be a better candidate for a statue. He was a newspaper editor, entrepreneur, city councilman and candidate for governor and one of the most respected black leaders of his day.
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