A 131-year long vestige of the Jim Crow era that symbolized the treasonous Confederate rebellion to maintain slavery will be no more after tomorrow. The 60 foot tall statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee will be removed from its pedestal tomorrow, after lawsuits to retain the statue were dismissed yesterday by the Virginia State Supreme Court in a unanimous decision:
"The Lee statue is the last Confederate icon along Richmond’s Monument Avenue to be removed.
In Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, the removals have signaled the rejection of Confederate glorification — a movement that sought to perpetuate discrimination against Black people while denying that a key impetus for the Civil War was the defense of slavery.
'Virginia’s largest monument to the Confederate insurrection will come down this week,' [Virginia Gov. Ralph] Northam said in a statement Monday. 'This is an important step in showing who we are and what we value as a Commonwealth.'”
Around the turn of the 20th century, racist Confederate sympathizers who wanted to reassert their power over newly enfranchised African Americans began erecting statues glorifying the leaders of the treasonous Confederacy in public parks and spaces. They wanted the statues to serve as a constant reminder of white supremacy and as an implicit threat of violence if that supremacy were challenged.
Recently, these statues have served as rallying points for far-right, racist demonstrators. The deadly white supremacist riot in Charlottesville in 2017 was triggered by the planned removal of the statues of Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The movement to remove Confederate statues from public places accelerated with the Black Lives Matter movement and the killing of numerous unarmed African Americans by law enforcement from 2019 - 2020, specifically George Floyd in Minneapolis. There are still a number of these disgraceful statues standing around the country that remain to be taken down.
(photo: Lee statue in Richmond, VA. Ned Oliver / Virginia Mercury)
