Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Confederacy symbols gone in the night
Statue, busts in Virginia Capitol quietly removed; Chicago ousts 2 Columbuses
RICHMOND, Va. — Virginia has removed from its state Capitol the busts and a statue honoring Confederate generals and officials. That includes a bronze statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee positioned in the same spot where he stood to assume command of the state’s armed forces in the Civil War nearly 160 years ago.
They are the latest Confederate symbols to be removed or retired in the weeks since the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police sparked a nationwide protest movement.
Virginia House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn, a Democrat, quietly ordered the Lee statue and busts of generals J.E.B. Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and others removed from the historic Old House Chamber. A moving crew worked through the night Thursday — carefully removing the monuments and their plaques and loading them into a truck and taking them to an undisclosed location.
The stealth approach avoids the possibility of protests or a lawsuit to keep the monuments in place, but may prompt criticism that the monuments were moved without public discussion.
“Virginia has a story to tell that extends far beyond glorifying the Confederacy and its participants,” Filler-Corn said in a statement. “Now is the time to provide context to our Capitol to truly tell the commonwealth’s whole history.”
Designed by Thomas Jefferson, the Virginia Capitol is the first statehouse to open after the American Revolution and was used as the Confederacy’s Capitol during much of the Civil War.
Like many Confederate monuments, most of those recently removed from Virginia’s Capitol were erected decades after the Civil War. They were commissioned and built during the Jim Crow era, when states imposed new segregation laws, and during the “Lost Cause” movement, when historians and others tried to depict the South’s rebellion as a fight to defend states’ rights, not slavery.
The Lee statue was approved in 1928 with the help of Gov. Harry Byrd, a Democrat, who would later go on to lead the state’s Massive Resistance to racially integrated schools. It’s $25,000 price tag (about $370,000 in today’s currency) was paid for by the state, donations and an in-kind donation from the sculptor.
Busts of Davis and Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, were donated to Virginia in the 1950s by Mississippi and Georgia.
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
In Chicago, two statues of Christopher Columbus that stood in parks there were taken down early Friday at the direction of Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a week after protesters trying to topple one of the monuments to the Italian explorer clashed with police.
Crews used a large crane to remove the statue in downtown Chicago’s Grant Park from its pedestal. The second statue was removed at dawn from Arrigo Park in Chicago’s Little Italy neighborhood.
In a statement issued after the statues were taken down, the Democratic mayor’s office said they were being “temporarily removed … until further notice.” It said the removals were “in response to demonstrations that became unsafe for both protesters and police, as well as efforts by individuals to independently pull the Grant Park statue down in an extremely dangerous manner.”
The statues’ removal took place after hundreds of protesters gathered Thursday night near Lightfoot’s home to call for defunding the Chicago Police Department. The crowd cheered when an activist used a megaphone to inform them that Lightfoot would be removing the Grant Park statue.
Both the Grant Park and Arrigo Park statues were vandalized last month. Statues of Columbus have been toppled or vandalized in other U.S. cities as protesters have called for their removal, saying that Columbus is responsible for the genocide and exploitation of native peoples in the Americas.
Pasquale Gianni of the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans said the mayor had told him ahead of time that both statues would be moved and temporarily housed elsewhere for public-safety reasons.
“The Italian American community feels betrayed. The mayor’s office is giving into a vocal and destructive minority. This is not how the democratic process is supposed to work,” he told WLS-TV.
During a Friday news conference in Arrigo Park in front of the fenced-in pedestal that once held that park’s Columbus statue, activist Raul Montes Jr. called for Lightfoot to resign for ordering the removal of the two statues. He said the statues’ removal was an insult to Italian Americans who helped “build this country.”
“She has erased history and this is a slap in the face of Italian Americans. … We want justice,” Montes said to applause by others gathered at the park.