Virginia Military Institute’s Board of Visitors voted to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson as it faces an independent investigation about campus culture.
It is unclear where the statue will be relocated to. After the Thursday vote, the board’s president, Bill Boland, suggested the statue be moved to the Civil War New Market battlefield where VMI cadets fought and died. The statue is currently located in front of the student barracks.
“I would rather move the statue once rather than twice,” Boland said, according to the Washington Post.
This month, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who attended VMI, opened an independent investigation into accusations of institutional racism at the college. The investigation was launched following the publication of a Washington Post article detailing black cadets’ encounters with racism at VMI.
The announcement that the statue will be removed comes days after the superintendent of the school, retired Gen. J.H. Binford Peay II, announced his resignation after serving for 17 years. Peay said Northam’s chief of staff told him that the governor and other leaders wanted him to resign and “lost confidence” in his leadership, according to CBS News.
Peay previously defended the statue of Jackson, who owned six slaves, and said in a July letter to the VMI community that the school does “not currently intend to remove any VMI statues or rename any VMI buildings.”
“Unlike many communities who are grappling with icons of the past, VMI has direct ties to many of the historical figures that are the subject of the current unrest,” Peay wrote. “Stonewall Jackson was a professor at VMI, a West Point graduate who served in combat in the Mexican War, a military genius, a staunch Christian, and yes, a Confederate General.”
