The Confederate monuments that were the impetus for the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, will be torn down nearly four years later.
The Charlottesville City Council voted unanimously on Monday night to remove the statues of Confederate icons Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
“We can tell our history without glorifying it. We can tell the history of the confederacy without saying ‘these are the people that we also put on statues and raise above everyone else to look down on other people,” Daniel Fairley, a local in favor of removing the statues, said during the public hearing, according to NBC 29.
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Philip Hamilton, a Republican running for the 57th district of the House of Delegates, pushed back on the removal of the statues and instead proposed adding a Ulysses S. Grant statue “right next to the General Robert E. Lee monument.“
In August 2017, hundreds of neo-Nazis flocked to Charlottesville to defend the Lee statue from its planned removal, and violent clashes ensued between them and counterprotesters. Neo-Nazi James Fields Jr. killed protester Heather Heyer at the rally when he ran his car into a crowd of counterprotesters.
The council voted to remove the statues in 2017, weeks after the violent clash, but a group of citizens filed a lawsuit to keep the statues, and a judge granted them an injunction to halt their removal. Virginia’s Supreme Court threw out the lawsuit in April 2021, paving the way for them to be removed.
No current council member was a member when the original vote occurred, so they voted again on Monday. A significant majority of residents who spoke during the meeting pushed for the removal of the statues.
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The city is now looking to residents to figure out what should happen with the statues once they’re taken down, according to a press release. They could be relocated to a museum, historical society, government, or military battlefield. Any such group interested in obtaining the statues has to inquire by July 8.
