A judge rules that the monuments to Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson are protected by a state law
SINCE 1924, a bronze statue of Robert E. Lee , the Confederacy’s top general and a brutal slave owner, has stood in a park in Charlottesville, Virginia. In August 2017, a crowd of white nationalists gathered in the pretty college town to protest against the city council’s plan to remove the statue. One of them drove a car into a group of counter-demonstrators, killing a young woman, Heather Heyer.
The battle over Charlottesville’s Confederate statues echoes similar ones elsewhere. Since 2015, when a white supremacist, fond of posing for photos with the Confederate flag, slaughtered nine black churchgoers in South Carolina, there has been a concerted push to remove monuments to the Confederacy from public places across America.
This is largely due to state laws, like Virginia’s. When in early 2017 Charlottesville’s city council voted to remove the statue of Lee, the Monument Fund, a local group, sued, citing a law, passed in 1904—in Richmond, capital of the Confederacy—against the removal of war memorials. After Ms Heyer’s murder, the council also voted to remove a statue of Jackson and the Monument Fund updated its lawsuit to include that.
In some cases, novel ways have been found around these laws. In Memphis, Tennessee, several Confederate statues came down after the city sold the two public parks in which they stood to a non-profit organisation for a mere $1,000 each. On other occasions the laws have been flouted. Last year protestors toppled “Silent Sam” a statue of a Confederate soldier at the University of North Carolina; the university chancellor then had the monument carted away before she resigned.
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