A friend lives a couple blocks from here, and says the police have the area on major lockdown (and have since yesterday). They're strictly enforcing a no firearms policy in the area immediately around the monument in question, but can't do anything about people in street since state law allows open carrying. One of our local TV stations has a live update feed, too.

From what I can tell, counter-protestors outnumber the others pretty heavily. I'm not surprised -- Richmond itself is a very liberal city. It's majority black, and thanks to VCU has a huge hipster/artsy population as well. All the conservative and more redneck types are almost entirely out in the surrounding counties (note than in Virginia cities and counties are completely separate entities, which is not typical in the US).

For a little context, the protest is taking place at the statue of Robert E. Lee (the most famous Confederate military commander during the Civil War) on Monument Avenue in The Fan neighborhood of Richmond. There are four Confederate monuments, erected in 1876 (Lee), 1907 (JEB Stuart), 1907 again (Jefferson Davis), and 1919 (Stonewall Jackson). Also oceanographer Matthew Maury (1929) and tennis player Arthur Ashe (1996).

Richmond obviously has more than its share of racist history...one of the largest slave markets in the country was here, and once the war broke out in earnest, Richmond was the capitol of the CSA. (Many of those buildings are still here, in fact.) There was some rumblings of all this in 1996 when the Arthur Ashe monument was being put up, but beyond that it hasn't been worse than any other southern city (and probably better than most). A couple years ago there was talk of cramming a baseball stadium down by the river, which was seen as a horrible idea, in no small part because it would've been built on top of the site of the aforementioned slave market, and a slave graveyard. More recently, there's been vague talk of "adding context" to the monuments, but there really hasn't been a big push by anyone AFAIK to move them. The protest itself seems to have mostly been organized by a group from Florida, which would explain the almost non-existent turnout from their side.

So far, things seem to have been calm, and I think everyone still remembers Charlottesville too clearly to be willing to start any rukus (it also helps that, as I said, virtually no pro-monument people seem to be there).