Robert Lee IV says Trump supports supremacy

An indirect descendant of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee said he was “disheartened” that President Donald Trump called his ancestor a “great general.”

Robert Lee IV, a North Carolina pastor who has been openly critical of his great-great-great-great uncle, accused the president of lying about the legacy of the Southern Civil War general. Speaking in front of 4,000 supporters Friday at a rally in Lebanon, Ohio, Trump declared that Lee was a “true great fighter” and “great general,” and claimed that President Abraham Lincoln once had a “phobia” of Lee, who “was winning battle after battle after battle.”

“He is showing us that he supports an idol of white supremacy and of hatred,” Robert Lee IV said of the president in a video statement he shared Saturday with his 31,000 Tw i t t e r followers. “Robert E. Lee fought for the continued enslavement of black bodies. It was for states’ rights, yes, but it was for states’ rights to own slaves. I find myself saddened by the state of our nation.”

On Sunday, Trump tweeted that the point of his comments about Lee, which were made during an anecdote about Ohio-born President Ulysses S. Grant, was to praise the Union general.

Robert Lee IV caused some controversy after a speech at the MTV Video Music Awards in August 2017, a few days after the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. — held to protest the city’s plan to remove a statue of the Confederate general — where counterprotester Heather Heyer was killed. Lee, dressed in a black cleric’s shirt and collar, introduced himself as the descendant of the general “whose statue was at the center of violence in Charlottesville.”

“Today, I call on all of us with privilege and power to answer God’s call to confront racism and white supremacy head on,” he said. “We can find inspiration in the Black Lives Matter movement, the women who marched in the Women’s March in January, and, especially, Heather Heyer, who died fighting for her beliefs.”

Lee said later that he resigned from his post at Bethany United Church of Christ in Winston-Salem, N.C., after some members raised concerns about the attention the congregation was receiving because of his outspokenness. Some church members were troubled by his comments praising the Black Lives Matter movement, the Women’s March and Heyer, he said in a statement.

The Confederate general’s legacy has been scrutinized, and fights about whether to keep monuments dedicated to him have consumed cities.