Disassociated Press

Here we have an AP report in the Times written by a Dionne Walker on the current controversy in the Virginia General Assembly.The controversy is over a resolution that will ''acknowledge with contrition'' the state's role in slavery.
As background they briefly mention the 1999 flood wall mural dispute...

In 1999, blacks complained that murals newly put up along the Richmond floodwall depicted Lee and other whites but no black leaders...Ultimately, murals of black leaders were added to the floodwall

No far be it from me to call the Times an outright prevaricator, I suppose they can't check everything the Associated Press feeds them, but their version of events has little connection to what actually happened.

In 1999 to decorate the city's new flood wall the city of Richmond commissioned 29 fabric murals of famous persons from the city's history. These murals included men and women, Blacks, Whites and Native Americans. It even included a likeness of Gabriel Prosser who in 1800 planned a slave revolt.......and massacre of the city's white population.
However when Said El-Amin, a city council member, saw a picture on the news of the mural of Robert E. Lee being put up he rushed to head of the local Riverfront Development Corporation and demanded that "Either it comes down or we jam." And so the mural came down.
It had nothing to do with lack of diversity in the murals but with the rather outspoken El-Amin's own dislike of Lee. The mural was later put back up after the incident became widely known, only to be just as quickly destroyed by an arsonist.

But millions of people will never know this. People reading papers as different as the New York Times, the Guardian and the International Herald Tribune will go on believing a pack of lies that put Virginians in the worst possible light.