Charlottesville removes statue of Robert E. Lee
4 years after fatal protest of removal, 200 watch quietly
Four years after a woman was killed and dozens were injured when white nationalists protested the planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va., workers removed the statue Saturday, along with a nearby monument to Stonewall Jackson, another Confederate general.
The larger-than-lifesized statue of Lee was hoisted off its granite base shortly after 8 a.m. as a crowd of about 200 looked on. As the flatbed truck carrying the bronze statue rumbled down East Jefferson Street, a toot of the truck’s horn prompted cheers and applause.
Jackson was removed about two hours later, and shortly after noon, the
City Council held an emergency meeting and voted unanimously to remove yet another statue, this one of explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. The 1919 sculpture has long provoked concern for its depiction of Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman who is shown along with the two betterknown explorers in a crouching manner that some see as subservient.
The decision by the city Friday to finally take down the statue of Lee came more than four years after the City Council initially put forth a plan to remove it from what was then known as Lee Park, prompting scores of white nationalists to descend on Charlottesville in August 2017 in a “Unite the Right” rally to protest the removal.
Counterprotesters confronted the rally, and a white supremacist drove into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators, killing a woman, Heather Heyer, and injuring dozens of others. The violence that day intensified calls to remove Confederate statues across the country.
“It feels good. It’s been a long time coming,” said Zyahna Bryant, a University of Virginia student who was a ninth grader in Charlottesville when she started a petition in
March 2016 calling on the city to remove the statue of Lee and to rename Lee Park, which is now called Market Street Park.
The city supported Bryant’s effort and voted to remove the statue of Lee riding on his horse, Traveller, which was erected in 1924, as well as a nearby statue of Jackson on horseback, which was erected in 1921. It also changed the name of the park where the Jackson statue stands from Jackson Park to Court Square Park.
“The statues coming down is the tip of the iceberg,” Bryant said. “There are larger systems that need to be dismantled. Educational equity is a good place to start.”
Mike Signer, an author and lawyer who was a city councilor and mayor when the “Unite the Right” rally was held in 2017, called the removal “a real step forward.” He said the statues had become “totems for these terrorists.”
“In so many ways, Charlottesville was a microcosm for what’s happened in the country: the advent of flagrant, open, violent white nationalism in public streets,” he said. “The ‘Unite the Right’ rally was clearly a prologue for the insurrection on Jan. 6.”
He said he was pleased that the City Council had moved quickly after the Virginia Supreme Court ruled in April that the city could remove the statues, a decision that overturned a 2019 Circuit Court ruling that found the statues could not be removed because they were protected by state law.
Discussions about the removal of the statue of Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea had been underway, and not long after the City Council’s vote Saturday, crews arrived to begin pulling it down.
Over the last month, the city has solicited expressions of interest from museums, historical societies and others interested in acquiring the monuments.
After Byrant submitted her petition, a commission created by the city to examine Charlottesville’s monuments found that the statues glorified the South’s racist past.