Charlottesville Removes Statues of Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson

The statues of confederates Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson that were at the center of the deadly 2017 “Unite The Right” rally are to be removed from Charlottesville, VA, officials announced.

Washington Post:

The city of Charlottesville will take down two prominent Confederate monuments Saturday, officials said, capping an intense push in courtrooms and on city streets to remove the state of Gen. Robert E. Lee that became a focal point of the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in 2017.

The removal is the result of more than five years of campaigning by residents to take down monuments to Lee and fellow Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson — all of which began with a petition in 2016 from Zyahna Bryant, then a local high school student.

Bryant, now a student at the University of Virginia, said the move was a first step for the city to begin to uplift stories that had been concealed or omitted from Charlottesville’s history.

“This is an opportunity to tell a more complete and historically accurate narrative of what Charlottesville is,” she said. “It shows that, this isn’t just Dixieland, this isn’t a place where Confederate generals did this and that. This is a place where Black people have worked to liberate themselves.”

The Charlottesville City Council voted in February 2017 to take down the Lee statue, prompting white supremacists to descend on the city months later to defend Confederate iconography. One of them drove his car through a crowd of counterprotesters, killing a 32-year-old woman, Heather Heyer.

As the city also pushed to remove the nearby Jackson statue, several local residents sued to prevent the statues from coming down. They argued that a state law passed in 1997 prohibited localities from removing Confederate war memorials.

But the city successfully appealed to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which earlier this spring said that the law applies only to monuments erected after the law was adopted. The ruling cleared the way for the city to remove the figures. On June 7, the council voted unanimously to do just that.