The Charlottesville City Council decided on Monday to give a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee to a local heritage center. The statue, which is bronze, will be melted down and converted into new artwork.
The city council debated Monday whether to sell the statue, gift it or keep it. Ultimately, the group voted 4-0 to donate it to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, which is located in Charlottesville.
In its offer, submitted to the city council in October, the center said that it would melt down the statue and create “a new work of public art that expresses the City’s values of inclusivity and racial justice.”
“This transformation will be informed by a collaborative and democratic process of community engagement that prioritizes the voices of descendants of enslaved people, extending the dialogues on race that have occurred locally since 2010,” the offer read. “Using this statue’s melted bronze material in a new way will be a powerful symbol of social change.”
While it’s not clear what the new artwork will look like, the center aims to select an artist for the project — titled “Swords Into Plowshares” — by 2024 and have it completed by 2027.
The statue was removed from its pedestal in July, as were two other statues in the city — one of fellow Confederate Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and another of explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark alongside their Native American guide Sacagawea.
The Lee statue had been a source of contention for years. Calls for it to be taken down were renewed in 2017 after the deadly “Unite the Right” rally and in 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s death and amidst the nation’s reckoning with racial injustice.
Meanwhile, just one state away, a statue of former Confederate general and leader of the Ku Klux Klan Nathan Bedford Forrest was removed from the side of a highway in Tennessee on Tuesday. It had been sitting on private property since 1997 and was the center of debate for years, The Tennessean reported.
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Original Article: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/robert-e-lee-statue-charlottesville-virginia-melted-down-artwork/
THIS IS BULLSHIT. QUIT DESTORING HISTORY. GO AND DTEAR DOWN YOUR HOUSE IF YOU WANT TO REMOVE SOMETHING. IT’S RACISTS.
I agree. What is wrong with learning from our History. This is sick
This Lee statue belongs in a Museum of Evil !!!
What a shame to think that you can change history this way. We can’t change the way it was, we weren’t there we’re not there now we’ve learned from that. Shameful to take it down and to melt it down
Erasing history is ignoring history, and we all know what happens to those who ignore history.
Too bad erasing history in that way, history consist of good and bad deeds done by some people of yestersyear, lessons that we can not forget and use it to teach new generations so they don’t commit the same mistakes or learn from good experiences, if we try to erase those lessons..future generations will be bound to repeat the mistakes…that is why history is so important in our lives, to better ourselves from history. I don’t know why the liberals are so in tune to erase history…would that be because they were deeply involved in those bad deeds…something to pound on….
Damn, just to make the minority happy! He is part of history and this is from a southern state. Man.
THIS IS WRONG ON SO MANY LEVELS. YOU CANNOT CHANGE HISTORY. YOU LEARN FROM HISTORY. ALL OF THE SOUTHERN STATUES SHOULD BE GATHERED IN ONE PLACE, SUCH AS STONE MOUNTAIN AND THE STORY SHOULD BE TOLD ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED TO CAUSE SUCH A CALAMITY IN OUR HISTORY. I HAD FAMILY ON BOTH SIDES AND I LOVE AND RESPECT THEIR DECISION TO STAY WITH THEIR STATE’S DECISION ON EITHER SIDE.
The reason for the statue is to remind those who were to come after of what was fought and for whom. Erasing history will not change it. Stop giving in to radicals who don’t approve of anything we i America do and only want to case derision.
Outside of Thomas Jefferson, probably the greatest man to be called a Virginian. He’s a man whose love for Virginia and his home place led him through 4 years of misery and destroyed the rest of his life, with his home place being illegally confiscated. Now you have at least for a short time, a governor whose legend is an appearance in black face that he’s still without the courage to own and the honor of a politician that has helped the citizens he supposedly represented. And now a spineless city council and an historical society that stands for nothing but flavor of the month history as they wish to sell it. Let’s destroy everything about this country’s greatest challenge, especially that there was ever a thing called slavery. It was a problem, it’s over, been over almost a couple of centuries; it has no relevance in today’s world.
Confederates = Hitlerites!
I suggest taking the melted statue and use it to cast a large phallis that should then be firmly inserted into the rectum of Joseph Robinette Biden white he is onstage addressing the world.