By: Brendan King | WTVR

RICHMOND, Va. — A prominent Confederate statue that stood in Richmond for more than 100 years before protesters tore it down is back on display for the public.

The Jefferson Davis statue on Monument Avenue was erected in 1907. It took just minutes for a crowd to tie a rope around the eight-foot Confederate statue and pull it down with a truck on June 10, 2020.

That statue was seen as the first domino to fall during the social justice protests that lead to additional Confederate statues to come down.

Davis has sat in storage at the city’s wastewater treatment plant under cover since.

The Valentine museum on East Clay Street will unveil their temporary exhibit showcasing the Davis statue to the public at 10 a.m. on Wednesday. The statue is on loan from Richmond’s Black History Museum for six months.

Valentine Museum Director Bill Martin said they had lengthy conversations on how to exactly display the statue. The team decided to display Davis the same way the public last saw it — on its side and covered in graffiti.

“We have other objects in our collection that address the history of racial oppression and Jim Crow laws here. We don’t have as many powerful objects that really tell the real story of what happened here in the summer of 2020,” said Christina Vida, the museum’s curator of general collections. “We want to make our visitors when they come down they’re seeing a 2020 object.”

Visitor feedback will inform the Valentine’s interpretation of the Edward Valentine Sculpture Studio, where the Davis statue was created by the museum’s first president.

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