Michael Paul Williams’ Pulitzer-winning Times-Dispatch columns
Explore Michael Paul Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning columns chronicling Richmond’s reckoning with Confederate monuments, school names and other symbols of white supremacy — and challenging the city to confront the history and legacy behind them.
(7) updates to this series since Updated
The original opponent of the Robert E. Lee statue issued a stern prophesy after the monument was erected in 1890.
We should have known this day was coming, because they knew this day was coming.
Christopher Columbus survived multiple voyages across the high seas. But his Richmond statue met an inglorious end at the bottom of a Byrd Park lake.
When a crane raised the 17 1/2 foot bronze statue off the granite pedestal, the weight of Richmond history became more bearable. But there's much heavier lifting to be done.
Hanover County appears intent to live on in infamy as the Prince Edward County of the 21st Century.
The moral arc bending toward justice is visible from Hill Monument Parkway, a North Side street named for the Confederate general.
Statues to the Confederate president, generals, soldiers and sailors have fallen by the wayside.
"Cultural institutions must engage difficult truths and hold space for multiple identities," writes columnist Michael Paul Williams.Â
Co-hosted by Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist Michael Paul Williams and Kelli Lemon, After the Monuments captures the zeitgeist of a nation struggling to move from symbolic to substantive change on racial issues.
Columnist Michael Paul Williams writes: "When it comes to that allegedly averted mass shooting at Dogwood Dell, there is no there there."
The shutdown of this post office next to an exhibit on a segregated railroad station typifies our nation's avoidance of its history of systemic racism.
This is an opinion column from Richmond Times-Dispatch opinion columnist Michael Paul Williams.Â
The shabby treatment of U.S. Army Lt. Caron Nazario – first by town of Windsor police and later by a federal jury in Richmond – typifies the anticlimactic denouement of our moment of racial reckoning.
"They broke no laws and were exercising their First Amendment right. America, after all, was founded on dissent," writes columnist Michael Paul Williams.Â
An action at Richmond City Council earlier this month showed the precarious state of social justice, three years after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020.
What we're seeing is a preview of what the Heritage Foundation would execute in its Project 2025: The replacement of civil servants, and their expertise, with hacks pushing ideological agendas.
The goal is to build a community of people descended from the enslaved in Amelia, "so that folks can actively participate in their repair or that healing that comes along with land-based reparations," Chavis said. Central Virginia Agrarian Commons is seeking a conservation easement that would prevent commercial development of the acreage.Â
In the aftermath of its exit from the World Cup, the United States women's national soccer team is being kicked around. Criticism of the team's performance and tactics is fair game, for sure. But the postmortem has been over the top in its viciousness, its unsupported accusations and its curious gleefulness. Â
We can romanticize the national unity following 9/11 — a consensus exploited toward destructive ends, including the shredding of civil liberties and the invasion of Iraq. But the nation did effectively gird itself against another foreign attack. But who could have foreseen that a prolonged domestic assault on our institutions would represent a more existential threat to America?
