Confederate statues removed in Charlottesville — four years after deadly rally
Officials in Charlottesville, Va. removed statues of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson on Saturday – and followed up with a lightning-fast toppling of a third monument, a tribute to explorers Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Sacagawea.
The toppling of the century-old bronzes came four years after the Confederate shrines sparked a deadly riot and heated national debate over historic monuments and America’s past
A small crowd of activists cheered briefly as city workers used a crane to hoist the statue of Lee onto a waiting flatbed truck, where it was hauled off to a storage facility until the city council decides its ultimate fate.
“Taking down this statue is one small step closer to the goal of helping Charlottesville, Virginia, and America, grapple with the sin of being willing to destroy black people for economic gain,” Charlottesville Mayor Nikuyah Walker said Saturday.
President Biden also welcomed the removal of the statues.
“As President Biden has said, there is a difference between reminders and remembrances of history,” a White House spokeswoman said. “The president believes that monuments to Confederate leaders belong in museums, not in public places.”
Zyahna Bryant, the University of Virginia student who was in 9th grade when she sparked the removal effort with an online petition in 2016, was among the onlookers celebrating Lee’s statue coming down.
“We are taking down a traitor… and his horse,” Bryant tweeted Saturday morning.
The statues’ ornate stone pedestals will be removed at a later date.
The banishment of the two monuments, both erected in the early 1920s, came nearly four years after a “Unite the Right” rally protesting their planned removal erupted in street violence between white nationalists and left-wing demonstrators that turned deadly when James Fields Jr., a 22-year-old rallygoer, rammed his car into a group of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer, 32.
Fields, who pleaded guilty to federal hate-crime charges, was sentenced to life in prison in 2019.
The violence made national headlines, and so did then-President Donald Trump when he said there was “blame on both sides” for the bloodshed.
A Virginia state law passed last year gave local governments the right to remove Confederate war memorials after holding public hearings and offering the monuments to museums and historical societies.
Charlottesville has received 10 requests from groups both within and outside of Virginia, NBC29 reported Friday.
Meanwhile, in an emergency meeting called with 20 minutes’ notice Saturday, the Charlottesville City Council voted unanimously to cancel the Lewis and Clark monument, another piece of public art targeted by left-wing activists.
“I feel that it should just be melted down,” Rose Ann Abrahamson, a Sacagawea descendant, said during the council meeting, The Daily Progress reported. “It’s entirely offensive and it should be obliterated.”
Within minutes, a city work crew arrived with ropes, a crane, and pry bars to wrench the artwork off the plinth where it had stood on Charlottesville’s West Main Street since 1919.
Lewis, who with Clark was sent by President Thomas Jefferson to explore the land west of the Mississippi River in 1804, was a local hero born in Charlottesville’s Albemarle County.
The bronze statue cast to honor Lewis and Clark’s expedition includes the two men and Sacagawea, their Shoshone guide and interpreter.
In recent years its design has been criticized for its portrayal of Sacagawea, who appears in a crouching position behind the standing white men — which activists have seen as disparaging.
But some historians contend that her posture shows her in action as a tracker and is not meant to place her in a subservient stance.
Charlottesville’s Lewis and Clark Exploratory Center has offered to take the statue — but the city council has not yet decided to accept its plan.
The city has allocated $1 million to remove and store the three statues until they can be donated or sold.
