According to a news release on Friday, the Charlottesville City Council voted unanimously on June 7 to remove the statues depicting Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, two of the most well-known Confederate army generals during the Civil War, from Market Street Park and Court Square Park. On July 7, according to the news release, the City Council allocated $1,000,000 towards the “removal, storage, and/or covering” of the Sacajawea, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark statue, in addition to the Lee and Jackson statues. The push for the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue was originally brought via petition to the Charlottesville City Council in March 2016. In August 2017, the “Unite the Right” rally, a gathering of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, and other far-right groups, aimed to preserve the Robert E. Lee statue, led to at least one death and more than a dozen injuries of anti-racist counterprotesters, according to CNN.
via insider: 2 Confederate statues in Charlottesville will be removed 4 years after a violent white supremacist rally
siehe auch: Charlottesville set to remove Lee statue that sparked rally. Charlottesville said in a news release Friday, July 9, 2021, that the equestrian statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee as well as a nearby one of Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson will be taken down Saturday. A statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that became a rallying point for white supremacists and helped inspire their infamous 2017 rally in Charlottesville will be hoisted off its pedestal this weekend and sent to storage, officials announced Friday. The Lee statue and another Confederate tribute nearby are both scheduled to be removed Saturday, nearly four years after violence erupted at the “Unite the Right” rally. The chaos left 32-year-old protester Heather Heyer dead and sparked a national debate over racial equity, further inflamed by former President Donald Trump’s insistence that there was “blame on both sides.” (…) The Charlottesville City Council voted in February 2017 to take down the Lee statue amid mounting public pressure, including a petition started by a Black high school student, Zyahna Bryant. A lawsuit was quickly filed, putting the city’s plans on hold, and white supremacists seized on the issue. First, they rallied by torchlight at the statue in May 2017, then a small group of Klansmen gathered in July, far outnumbered by peaceful protesters. The issue reached a crescendo in August, when white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizers of the “Unite the Right” rally gathered in the city to defend the Lee statue and seize on the issue for publicity, meeting in what was the largest such gathering of extremists in at least a decade. They brawled in the streets near the statue with anti-racist counterprotesters as police largely stood by and watched. The scenes of intense violence shocked the nation. A short time later, an avowed white supremacist and admirer of Adolf Hitler intentionally plowed his car into a crowd of people, killing Heyer and leaving others with life-altering injuries.
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Von <a rel=”nofollow” class=”external text” href=”https://www.flickr.com/people/153804281@N02″>Evan Nesterak</a> – <a rel=”nofollow” class=”external text” href=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/153804281@N02/36421689132/”>Memorial for Heather Heyer, H. Jay Cullen, and Berke M.M. Bates</a>, CC BY 2.0, Link