Charlottesville Removes Confederate Statues

including the statue of Robert E. Lee that sparked a deadly white supremacist rally nearly four years ago.

 The removals were well overdue, Zyahna Bryant told the Washington Post. She was in the ninth grade when she started a petition in 2016 to remove the Confederate monument, prompting the Charlottesville City Council to vote in February 2017 to remove the Lee statue and a nearby statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson.

  “This should have happened a long time ago,” she said as she watched workers remove the statues on Saturday.

 The removals have been held up for years by a lawsuit filed in March 2017 to block the removal under a state law passed in 1997 to bar cities from removing Confederate memorials. Many Southern states have enacted similar laws to prevent local communities from removing Confederate monuments and memorials.

 That summer, members of the Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazi groups, and other white nationalists traveled from across the country to Charlottesville to protest the removal of the Lee statue. On August 12, 2017, a man attending the “Unite the Right” rally drove his car into a crowd of people, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 19 other counterprotestors.

 A circuit court judge then ordered an injunction against removing the statues, and the city appealed. This April, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that the 1997 law applies only to monuments and memorials erected after the law was enacted, clearing the way for Charlottesville to remove the nearly 100-year-old Lee and Jackson monuments.

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On Saturday morning, a crane lifted the Lee and Jackson statues onto trucks and drove them away as crowds of residents cheered. Workers also removed two statues that celebrate violence and oppression against Native Americans.

 A Legacy of Racial Injustice

 All four statues were commissioned by Paul Goodloe McIntire in the early 1920s, when the city’s Ku Klux Klan membership was at its peak. One of Charlottesville’s largest benefactors, McIntire’s many donations to the city included the whites-only McIntire Park and a separate park “for use as a playground for the colored citizens of Charlottesville,” C-VILLE Weekly reported.

 Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue, commissioned in 1924, was prominently placed in a downtown park (also named for Lee until recently), that has long served as a fairgrounds for annual festivals. The Jackson statue was placed three blocks away, just yards from a courthouse where enslaved people had been bought and sold, The Washington Post reported.

 Then-Vice Mayor Wes Bellamy said in 2016 that some residents believe the Confederate statues were installed as a “psychological tool to show dominance of the majority over the minority” during that time.