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The public now has a 30-day period to propose new plans for the statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson after they have been removed. According to city documents, Charlottesville is soliciting proposals “for any museum, historical society, government or military battlefield interested in acquiring the statues, or either, for their transportation and placement.”
Activists who spoke in the public hearing portion of the meeting said they wanted the statues removed before the four-year anniversary of the riots, in part due to concerns that the statues would become a rallying point for white nationalist protesters.
Brian Wheeler, Charlottesville’s director of communications, told CNN Tuesday that after several years of intense effort, “the city has taken a huge step forward toward telling a more complete history of our community.
“We look forward to transforming downtown parks by removing these racist symbols of Charlottesville’s past,” Wheeler said in a statement. “There is still a lot of work to do in Charlottesville’s future as we work towards our racial and economic justice goals, but this is an important milestone on that journey.”
Don Gathers, a Charlottesville resident and community leader, has been involved in the removal of the statues since before the Unite the Right rally and told CNN the vote was “relaxing.”
“It was the embodiment of many years of work done by a large number of extraordinary people in the community. The next step now is the actual removal. The process should be smooth, seamless and fast,” Gathers said, adding that the statues should not be moved to another city. “No other region should bear the evil they represent. They must be destroyed – their son-in-law. This follows, a ritual cleaning of the region they have controlled for so long.”
Jalan Schmidt, a religious studies specialist and director of the Memory Project at the University of Virginia, worked to remove the statues and told CNN she was impressed by the number of community members who warned the city council not to switch the statues to someone else. The community where they “will continue to promote the ideology of the lost cause”.
“This marks a shift in the conversation about monuments from just demands for antiquities to be removed to concern about what happens to statues after they are removed,” Schmidt said Tuesday. Several speakers urged the council to think creatively about how to dispose of the memorial, even expressing support for its “conversion” by dissolving it.
Monday night’s vote comes after nearly four years of failed attempts to remove the statues. The effort began before the 2017 Unite the Right rally, which then brought thousands of white nationalists to Charlottesville, many of them bearing Confederate and neo-Nazi symbolism, to protest the removal of the statues. An opposing white supremacist, Haier, was killed, and 19 others were injured when he smashed his car into a crowd. More people were injured in separate incidents during the weekend rally.
Ziahna Bryant, who drafted a Charlottesville City Council petition to remove the statues more than five years ago when she was a high school student, told CNN that the decision to remove the statues is a “win” and more needs to be done.
“I want to stress that this is not the end of work to dismantle the same systems and structures that these statues represent, in fact, this is only the beginning — removing these statues is an outstanding fruit,” Bryant, now a student at the University of Virginia, said Tuesday. “However, I want to make it clear that there can be no unity and healing without accounting for our full and complete history, a history that includes the voices of those who have traditionally been silenced, marginalized, and erased; and a true commitment to racial equality through the redistribution of resources.”
In October 2017, two months after the riots, a Circuit Court ruled against removing the statues from public places, saying that state law prohibits the removal of “memorials and monuments of past wars,” according to court documents. In April, the Virginia Supreme Court overturned that decision, ruling that the Lee and Stonewall memorials “were erected long before there was a law permitting the establishment of a city for a memorial or memorial and regulating the disturbance or interference in that war memorial or memorial,” according to the opinion. Judge S. Bernard Goodwin. Cities across Virginia have removed Confederate monuments, including, in Charlottesville, a statue of a Confederate soldier was removed from the district court in September 2020.
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