After years of debate, the statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, is coming down for good.
The city announced on Friday that they would be removing the statue of Lee as well as that of the Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson from Emancipation Park on Saturday. This move will likely spark heated backlash. The removal comes over five years after the city council initially received a petition to remove Lee’s figure, prompting white supremacists and neo-nazis from across the country to descend on the city for the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally that left one person dead.
In their press release about the decision to remove the pieces, the city stated that they’d received several inquiries regarding relocating the statues to museums, military locations, or historical societies.
In the years following the Black Lives Matter movement, public outcry to remove markers representing white supremacy has significantly increased. In 2017, the great-great-grandsons of Stonewall Jackson penned an open letter to Richmond, Virginia officials, asking that they remove a separate monument of their grandfather.
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