The statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee is removed from its pedestal Wednesday in Richmond, Virginia
RICHMOND (Virginia, US), Sept 9 (NNN-AGENCIES) — In a move that will cap decades of activism, crews on Wednesday removed one of the United States’ largest remaining Confederate statues a towering statue of Robert E Lee in Richmond, Virginia, more than 130 years after it was installed.
Despite its massive size, it was lifted from its pedestal in one piece and is headed for storage. Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, was there as the statue came down and appeared pleased by its removal. A crowd also chanted and cheered as the statue of Lee — atop a horse — was lifted into the air by a crane.
People cheer as they watch the removal of the Lee statue, the largest Confederate monument in Richmond
Northam announced plans to remove the statue in June 2020 during nightly racial justice protests in Richmond after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, but that plan was held up by lawsuits, including one from a group of residents from Richmond’s historic Monument Avenue that wanted to keep the 40-foot-tall memorial intact. Last week, the Virginia Supreme Court decided to bring it down.
In the decades following its construction in 1890, the statue became a focal point for a wealthy, all-white neighborhood; Lee was later joined by statues to other Confederate leaders. In 1996, a statue of Black tennis champion Arthur Ashe was added to the avenue despite serious opposition under the direction of then-Gov. Douglas Wilder, the first Black person to serve as governor of any state since Reconstruction.
Lee’s statue was the largest Confederate monument in the city of Richmond and one of the largest in the country. Nearly every other Confederate statue in Virginia’s capital was removed last summer, either by protesters or the city itself at the request of Mayor Levar Stoney.
Activists have celebrated the removal of the monument but have noted it was only one of the demands they’ve made. They said they’ll continue calling for major structural reforms to the state’s criminal justice system.
Officials said the graffiti-covered pedestal will remain in place while discussions continue about the future of Monument Avenue.
Activists have called for the statue’s removal for years, saying it glorified the US South’s slave-holding past. However, officials had long resisted its takedown, as have some residents of Virginia who argued moving the monument would be akin to erasing history.
Still, 10 days after George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, was killed under the knee of a Minneapolis, Minnesota police officer in May 2020, sparking nationwide protests against police brutality and racism, Democratic Governor Ralph Northam announced plans to take down the statue.
Two subsequent lawsuits stalled the removal for more than a year, but rulings last week by the Supreme Court of Virginia cleared the way for the statue to be taken down.
“This is an important step in showing who we are and what we value as a commonwealth,” Northam said in a news release announcing final plans for the removal.
The city has removed more than a dozen other Confederate monuments on city land since Floyd’s death, but the Lee statue – one of the largest and most recognizable Confederate statues in the country – drew a crowd of both supporters and opponents.
The Lee statue was created by the internationally renowned French sculptor Marius Jean Antonin Mercie and is considered a masterpiece, according to its nomination to the National Register of Historic Places, where it has been listed since 2007.
When the monument arrived in 1890 from France, an estimated 10,000 Virginians used wagons and rope to haul its pieces more than two kilometers to where it now stands.
The statue was the first of five Confederate monuments to be erected on Richmond’s Monument Avenue in the wake of the US Civil War, which ended in 1865. They were erected as Jim Crow racial segregation laws were on the rise in the South.
Northam administration has said the government would seek public input on the statute’s future.
The pedestal will be left behind, at least in the short term, amid efforts to rethink the design of Monument Avenue.
Some racial justice advocates have said the graffiti-covered pedestal should remain as a symbol of the protest movement that erupted after Floyd’s killing. — NNN-AGENCIES
