Photo: Win McNamee / Getty Images
The city of Charlottesville, Virginia , removed a statue of Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on Saturday , knocking down the symbols that were in the center of the Unite the Right demonstration, held in 2017, almost four years after the violent demonstration of white supremacists that left a deceased person.
The statues of Lee and Jackson, and threats to remove them, served as a rallying cry for the far right in the summer of 2017 .
Tension turned to violence at the Unite the Right demonstration of the 12 August 2017 when neo-Nazis clashed with counter protesters . A woman, Heather Heyer, was killed when a man crashed her vehicle into a crowd of pedestrians. Dozens more people were injured in that attack and other acts of violence.
The statues will remain the property of the city until the city council decides what to do with them. Ten groups have expressed interest in the statues, according to a city statement.
“Toppling this statue is a small step towards the goal of help Charlottesville, Virginia and the United States deal with the sin of being willing to destroy black people for financial gain, ”said Charlottesville Mayor Nikuyah Walker as the crane approached the Lee memorial, the Associated Press reported .
The crane lifted the statue from its pedestal in a park in the city center early in the morning.
“The withdrawal is a small step closer to the goal of helping Charlottesville, Virginia, and the United States face their sin of being willing to destroy African Americans to achieve economic benefits, “said Walker, the mayor of the city, while the statue was transferred to a municipal compound, according to local media.
Shortly after, The authorities also took the statue of another Confederate general, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson.
The decision to withdraw them was made in 2016, but several legal appeals postponed the measure until finally, this year, the Virginia Supreme Court upheld the measure. Both effigies had been raised in the decade of 1920.
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And later , during an emergency town hall meeting at noon Saturday, officials voted unanimously to remove another statue featuring Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and interpreter Shoshone Sacagawea, which was withdrawn on Saturday afternoon, according to NPR .
That town in the state of Virginia, about 47, 000 inhabitants, was scenario of clashes after a demonstration called by white supremacists between the 11 Y 12 August 2017, during which a white woman was killed by a neo-Nazi and 19 people were injured.
The Confederate side, which lost the United States Civil War (1861 – 1865), consisted of secessionist and pro-slavery states, and many African Americans consider offensive those emblems of theirs that still remain in the country.
In June 811, then-US President Donald Trump signed a decree ordering the prosecution “to the greatest extent possible” of any act of Vandalism against federal property.
The decree was adopted in response to the wave of protests against racism that shook the US over the death, in May of last year, of the African American George Floyd , suffocated by a white police, and that led to the demolition of numerous statues.
Across the United States, efforts to remove statues of Confederate generals and soldiers gained much momentum after the death in May of 2020 by George Floyd, an unarmed black man from Minneapolis.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a group which tracks hate groups and symbols, reported in February that at least 160 symbols honoring the Confederacy were removed in 2020. From them, 94 were monuments.
Two months ago, the current US president Joe Biden revoked a series of decrees of his predecessor, including the aforementioned to the destruction of Confederate statues.
With information from EFE