Court: Statues of 2 rebel generals in Virginia can go
FALLS CHURCH, Va. — This state’s highest court ruled Thursday that the city of Charlottesville can take down two statues of Confederate generals, including one of Robert E. Lee that became the focus of a violent white nationalist rally in 2017.
The state Supreme Court overturned a circuit court decision in favor of a group of residents who sued to block the city from taking down the Lee statue and a nearby monument to fellow Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Charlottesville’s City Council had voted to remove both.
White supremacist and neo-Nazi organizers of the August 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville said they went to the city to defend the statue of Lee. They clashed with counterprotesters before a man plowed his car into a crowd of people, killing a woman.
The Jackson statue was erected in Jackson Park in 1921, and the Lee statue was erected in Lee Park in 1924.
City officials praised the ruling in a statement Thursday and said they plan to redesign the park spaces where the statues are located “in a way that promotes healing and that tells a more complete history of Charlottesville.”
Mayor Nikuyah Walker thanked the community “for their steadfastness and perseverance over the past five years. For all of us who were on the right side of history, Bravo!”
In Thursday’s decision, State Supreme Court Justice Bernard Goodwyn said both statues were erected long before a 1997 state law that barred local governments from removing them.
He wrote that the law shouldn’t be applied retroactively; those seeking to keep the statues in place had argued that the Legislature’s obvious intent was to do just that.
The 1997 law “did not provide the authority for the city to erect the statues, and it does not prohibit the city from disturbing or interfering with them,” Goodwyn wrote.
The state Supreme Court also ruled that the circuit court erred in ordering the city to pay $365,000 in attorneys’ fees and costs for the plantiffs.
Braxton Puryear, one of the attorneys for the residents who sued, said he hadn’t read the ruling yet and couldn’t immediately comment on it. Frederick Payne, a Charlottesville lawyer who was listed as the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, also declined comment Thursday.
The Virginia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and The Monument Fund also were plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed against the city in March 2017.