The people have spoken. The city Public Art Commission has spoken. The city has decreed that the live oak tree at Broad and Adams streets cannot co-exist with the Maggie Walker statue. But one voice has been surprisingly absent from the discussion: Maggie Walker’s.

The art commission cited reasonable logistical and aesthetic concerns about the tree’s proximity to the proposed statue. But they also gave credibility to the suggestion that the tree conjures an image of lynching, thus dishonoring Mrs. Walker’s legacy.

If our view of the oak tree is to be allegorical, then shouldn’t it be Maggie Walker who shapes that symbolism? A tree only represents lynching if we require it to.

Throughout her career, Mrs. Walker ardently campaigned against lynching, yet she never viewed trees as her adversaries. On the contrary, Mrs. Walker saw trees as symbols of growth, symbols of life. She evoked tree imagery in the slogan of her youth group, the St. Luke Cadets, when she espoused, “As the twig is bent, the tree is inclined.”

In 1906 while summoning support for her two latest businesses, Mrs. Walker insisted, “The Emporium and the Bank to us is the sprouting acorn — but to your boys and girls, it will be the tall spreading, giant oak, affording shelter and protection for a thousand.”

Wouldn’t the best way to honor Mrs. Walker’s legacy be to value her own history? After all, Mrs. Walker, herself, was once reverently referred to as a tree. After her passing in 1934, the Richmond Planet eulogized, “Surely a tree has fallen, but in vases made of human hearts its leaves will be sacredly kept and cherished in saintly memory of God’s own gift to a struggling race.”

ETHAN BULLARD

Richmond