This morning in Richmond, VA, capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War, its top general was finally cut down. His statue, that is.
Erected in 1890, a full 35 years after he surrendered at Appomattox, the statue of Robert E. Lee was removed from its downtown perch to chants of “Na Na /Hey Hey /Goodbye”, the last of six confederate statues to come down on Richmond’s Monument Avenue.
To quote from nytimes.com:
At 8:54 a.m., a man in an orange jacket waved his arms, and the 21-foot statue rose into the air and glided, slowly, to a flatbed truck below. The sun had just come out and illuminated the towering gray pedestal as a small crowd on the east side of the monument let out a cheer.
“As a native of Richmond, I want to say that the head of the snake has been removed,” said Gary Flowers, a radio show host and civil rights activist, who is Black and was watching the activity. He said he planned to celebrate on Wednesday night and would tell pictures of his dead relatives that “the humiliation and agony and pain you suffered has been partly lifted.”
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam had planned to remove the Lee statue in June 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the following protests, but faced legal challenges from a group of Richmond residents.
Protesters toppled the monument erected of Confederate President Jefferson Davis that same month, and in July 2020 Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney invoked his emergency powers to remove other Confederate monuments, such as those honoring Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and Gen. J.E.B. Stuart.
In an opinion issued last week, the Virginia Supreme Court dismissed the Lee statue case, saying that all the plaintiffs’ claims were without merit, and dissolved injunctions the lower court imposed, paving the way for today’s statute removal.