Humiliating a conquered people… this is what Bolsheviks do.
Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue will be melted down by city’s African American history museum, by Teo Armus, Washington Post, December 7, 2021
The statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that once provoked a deadly weekend of violence in Charlottesville will soon be melted down and turned into a new piece of public artwork, following a vote by city lawmakers early Tuesday morning.
Since taking it down over the summer, the city had been searching for a new owner for the 1,100-pound monument, which had served as the focal point of the 2017 Unite the Right rally. Six proposals were submitted by arts groups, historical societies or individuals, who offered to pay as much as $100,000 for the Lee sculpture and a toppled monument of fellow general Stonewall Jackson.
But the Charlottesville City Council voted 4 to 0 to hand the bronze statue over to the only local bidder: the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, a Black-led museum whose “Swords Into Plowshares” idea would repurpose the metal entirely.
Andrea Douglas, the museum’s executive director, said in a video that the project aims “to create something that transforms what was once toxic in our public space into something beautiful and more reflective of our entire community’s social values.”
Artists will consult Charlottesville residents in the coming months, including in forums early next year, to determine what the public art might end up looking like. Douglas said she hopes that collaborative process can also provide a framework for other communities debating what to do with toppled Confederate monuments.
Virginia to dismantle pedestal where Robert E. Lee statue stood in Richmond
The movement to take down the Lee statue began in 2015 with a petition crafted by Zyahna Bryant, who was then a local high school student. City lawmakers responded by voting to remove the Lee statue in February 2017.
A group of residents sued only a few weeks later, sparking a prolonged fight in court over whether the city could topple such monuments. And others took their defense of the Confederate iconography to the streets. At the white-supremacist Unite the Right rally that summer, one man drove his car through a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.
Despite proposals to purchase the statue of Robert E. Lee made to the city of Charlottesville, one offering as much as $100,000 for the monument, the city council selected the proposal by an African American heritage center to melt it down.
Ritualistic humiliation of a conquered people.
Just part of the Communist coup going on across America.
