The city of Charlottesville can take down the statues of two Confederate generals, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
The decision overruled a state circuit court decision that had prevented the removal of Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson statues. Both statues were at the center of 2017’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, at which white supremacist protesters opposing the statues’ removal clashed with counterprotesters.
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Neo-Nazi James Fields Jr. killed protester Heather Heyer at the rally when he ran his car into a crowd of counterprotesters.
“In the present case, the statues were erected long before there was a statute which both authorized a city’s erection of a war memorial or monument and regulated the disturbance of or interference with that war memorial or monument,” Supreme Court Justice Bernard Goodwyn wrote in the court’s judgment. “The Lee Statue and the Jackson Statue were not erected pursuant to [the aforementioned law] and so, the prohibitions against disturbing or interfering with monuments or memorials erected pursuant to [that law] do not apply to the statues.”
The Charlottesville City Council voted in February 2017 to remove the statue of Lee from Lee Park, which had been erected in 1924, and to rename and redesign Jackson Park, where a statue of Stonewall Jackson was erected in 1921.
A group of residents sued the city after the vote to stop the statues’ removal, and the circuit court ruled in their favor.
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Charlottesville Mayor Nikuyah Walker did not immediately respond to the Washington Examiner‘s request for comment.
