Williams: Virginia just had a horrible week. Ashe Boulevard is a small step toward reconciling our past and present.

”Whatever his abilities and talents, there were places where he could not go and things he could not do,” writes Raymond Arsenault. ”As he would learn, there were schools he could not attend, bus and streetcar seats he could not occupy, hospitals where he could not be treated, public parks he could not enter, and even tennis courts upon which he could not play.

“Born on the cusp of the civil rights revolution, he outlived these and other Jim Crow restrictions. But the indignities of his childhood and adolescence survived long enough to bruise his psyche and complicate his path to personal fulfillment and adulthood. To succeed, he would have to overcome.”

Arthur Robert Ashe Jr. overcame. But the indignities of Virginia’s complicated racial past still scar our city and state. Our psyches remain fragile.

We’ve been through a month in Virginia — a statement that requires no explanation — and have our own indignities to overcome.

In voting Monday night to rename Boulevard in honor of Arthur Ashe, Richmond City Council took a face-saving step toward redemption.

Councilwoman Kimberly Gray, who shepherded the proposal to passage, called it “the morally right thing to do” as we work to unshackle Richmond from its past.

In a city bedecked with monuments to the Lost Cause, an intersection of Ashe Boulevard and Monument Avenue, at the Stonewall Jackson statue, represents a powerful symbolism. This collision of past and present perspectives will say: This is what we were; this is what we strive to be.

Paige Lanier Chargois, a retired clergywoman and former national associate director of Hope in the Cities, pointed out in an interview before Monday’s vote that no major thoroughfare in Richmond is named for an African-American.

Chargois called Ashe “one of the leading blacks not of Richmond, not of Virginia, not of the United States, but of the world. And if that caliber of African-American does not deserve a boulevard to honor him, Richmond is not just the former capital of the Confederacy; it remains the capital of Confederate attitudes.”

Indeed, blackface controversies involving Gov. Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring were sandwiched between sexual assault allegations against Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax.

“We’re in a critical moment,” Don Coleman, pastor of East End Fellowship, said in an interview before Monday’s vote. “But I believe it can be an amazing awakening that can happen.”

Arthur Ashe Boulevard will not bind all wounds. But reconciliation should not be pain-free. We haven’t earned the right to complacency, or the audaciousness to cite inconvenience as a reason not to redress grievous wrongs, past and present. And as Councilman Michael Jones said Monday, we haven’t earned the right to be satisfied and stop this work because we’ve renamed a street.

This work requires more humility and less hubris.

Northam, in an interview Sunday morning at the Executive Mansion, shown on the CBS program “Face the Nation,” sparked more anger when he referred to the Africans who arrived at Old Point Comfort in 1619 as “indentured servants” — a distinction that melted away in decades as slavery became race-based and permanent.

“Virginia needs someone that can heal. There’s no better person to do that than a doctor,” said Northam, a pediatric neurologist, in justifying his reason for sticking around.

Brandy Faulkner, a visiting assistant professor at Virginia Tech’s College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, disagreed in an email sent out by the university’s news department.

“Governor Northam is not capable of leading that conversation,” she said.

“It’s a very serious subject with a long and painful history across the entire state. Each time the governor speaks, he causes more harm. Now is the time for him to take a step back, listen to those who have been directly affected by his words and actions, and acknowledge that he needs time to learn. A good leader must also be a good listener.”

As we’ve thrashed about in recent days, I wondered: How do we reach reconciliation?

“My answer is it requires accepting that we’re all broken,” said Coleman, former chairman of the Richmond School Board.

“When people make the argument that ‘I didn’t do it, I wasn’t involved in it,’ that to me models that they haven’t yet accepted their own brokenness,” Coleman said.

How do people reach such an acceptance?

“Humble thyself in the sight of the Lord and He will lift you up,” Coleman said. And that happens “at the point where I can authentically love somebody more than myself. That is our only hope.

“Does that make sense? No, that doesn’t make sense, unless you recognize we’re all supposed to be one human family,” Coleman said. “And based on our history, it’s obvious we haven’t believed that.”

In a city that in its street nomenclature and monuments idolizes the polarizing figures of the Confederate cause, the idea of naming a street for a figure as universally revered as Ashe should have been a no-brainer.

Arthur Ashe, he said, “is one of the greatest humanitarians who ever lived, and we’re worried about — again — practical things,” Coleman said. “This is a statement that we’re sincere about moving forward.”

True reconciliation requires people in a position of power or privilege to give something up. Its practitioners do not demand reconciliation only on their own terms. Or, “the right way,” as opponents of the name change kept saying, apparently unaware of how condescending that sounds.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” expressed his impatience with the white moderate who constantly says: “’I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’”

Or in Richmond’s case, a more convenient place at a later time.

During a month like this, which reopened a chapter of shame in a state that was starting to feel good about itself, we need Ashe’s good name much more than he and his family need any sort of validation.

Arthur Ashe overcame. Our city and state, in moving beyond destructive legacies, have a lot of work to do.

“There are moments in time when cities can step into or shy away from greatness,” resident Jonathan Davis told the City Council.

City Council stepped up. Perhaps in some small way, Ashe Boulevard can be a road toward reconciliation.