Virginia court rules Charlottesville can take down Confederate statues
Virginia’s highest court ruled on 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 white nationalist rally in 2017 that turned extremely violent and ultimately deadly.
The state supreme court overturned an appeal court decision that had been previously made 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 general Thomas J “Stonewall” Jackson. Charlottesville’s city council 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 marched at night through the streets and on the campus of the University of Virginia in the picturesque college town carrying torches, sporting common far-right dress codes and chanting slogans such as “Jews will not replace us”.
Then they next morning there was a massive clash of far right attendees who converged towards the Robert E Lee statue in a park and clashed violently with counter-protesters.
Later, a neo-Nazi drove a car into a crowd of counter-protesters in another part of town and killed one, activist Heather Heyer. James Fields was later convicted of Heyer’s murder.
Donald Trump at the time refused to condemn the white supremacists, blaming “many sides” for violence and also saying there were “very fine people on both sides”.
Joe Biden, the US president, ran for the White House in 2020 saying he was motivated to do so by Trump’s failure to unequivocally condemn the far right in Charlottesville in 2017.
The Jackson statue was erected in Jackson Park in Charlottesville in 1921 and the Lee statue was erected in Lee Park in the city in 1924. In 1918, the city had accepted a resident’s offer to donate land for parks for both statutes.
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”.
Charlottesville’s mayor, Nikuyah Walker, praised the court ruling and those in the community who had pushed for the statues’ removal “for their steadfastness and perseverance over the past five years. For all of us, who were on the right side of history, Bravo!”
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 should not be applied retroactively.
Legal representatives of those suing to remove the statues did not comment.
The University of Virginia’s Richard Schragger, who specializes in the inter
section of constitutional law and local government law, said he expects Thursday’s
decision to be the final word in the long-running case since he doesn’t see any grounds for a challenge under federal law, in other words to the US supreme court.
In the Virginia state capital of Richmond, city officials removed numerous statues on the city’s famed Monument Avenue after they became a focal point of racial justice protests last summer.
But a huge statue of Lee remains, with a lawsuit about that now in front of the state supreme court.