RICHMOND — Workers are set to remove the imposing statue of Robert E. Lee that has embodied this city’s mythology as the former capital of the Confederacy, affixing hardware Wednesday morning that will soon bring the bronze icon to the ground after 131 years of towering over rooftops.
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Security was tight, as state and local law enforcement are closing streets for several blocks around the Lee traffic circle on Monument Avenue, a Parisian-style boulevard of century-old homes. Citing both security and safety — the statue looms 60 feet above the ground — authorities have restricted public access to a small area across the street and urged people to watch the action online.
Virginia Supreme Court clears way for Lee statue in Richmond to come down
But a boisterous crowd still was expected to assemble to see the demise of a symbol that had endured for generations.
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On Wednesday morning, a group of Black Lives Matter protesters, many of whom had been an almost daily presence near the statue since last summer, had made it behind the police barricades and spent the night in front of an apartment building overlooking the Lee circle. They played music, laughed and joked as the sun came up and workers began positioning the massive crane that would eventually hoist the statue.
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As recently as two years ago, Confederate enthusiasts waving battle flags were a common sight around Richmond. A succession of Black mayors and Black-majority city councils dared not challenge Richmond’s Lost Cause iconography, and even the violence of 2017’s “Unite the Right” rally around a Lee statue in Charlottesville failed to change the landscape in Virginia’s capital.
Last summer’s social justice protests, triggered by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, smashed the status quo. Rallies for racial justice quickly focused on the Lee statue as the most visible symbol of past inequities in perhaps all of the South. Protesters covered its stone base with a riot of graffiti condemning police violence and racial injustice.
Northam says Virginia will remove Lee monument in Richmond
Gov. Ralph Northam (D) announced on June 4, 2020, that he was ordering Lee removed from the state-owned property. A handful of local residents challenged the action in court and a judge temporarily blocked it. Though the residents lost their case, they appealed to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which unanimously ruled in Northam’s favor last week, clearing the way for the removal.
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During the delay, state officials used drones and cherry pickers to study the condition of the statue and the bolts holding it in place. They worked with historical preservationists and art experts to plan for the removal, which is expected to involve cutting the statue into two pieces, with Lee’s torso separated from the body of the horse.
Sculptor Paul DiPasquale, a consultant to the contractor overseeing the work, said plans call for tipping the pieces onto their sides and cushioning them for transport with layers of tires and wooden pallets.
The state plans to keep the statue in an undisclosed storage location until deciding what to do with it.
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In the meantime, the giant stone base will remain in place, though its plaques extolling Lee will be removed. The General Assembly has commissioned the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to gather input from experts and the public to come up with a new vision for the site and the Monument Avenue corridor.
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After last year’s protests, the circle where Lee stands became an impromptu civic forum. Protesters planted a vegetable garden, put up a basketball hoop, gave speeches, staged concerts, registered people to vote and hosted cookouts on the lawn around the monument.
Residents, most of whom expressed approval for removing the statue, came to complain about the constant disruptions, which sometimes involved nighttime conflict between Black Lives Matter supporters and Confederate sympathizers and, not infrequently, the sound of gunfire.
Early this year, the state installed fencing around the traffic circle and blocked all access to the statue. Protesters dwindled in number, though a handful kept up a vigil in a median strip.
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Almost all other Confederate memorials in Richmond have already come down. Protesters dragged former Confederate president Jefferson Davis off his pedestal last spring, and Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney quickly decided to get rid of three other Confederate monuments on city-owned property on Monument Avenue — Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart and Matthew Fontaine Maury — along with several others around the city.
The only city-owned Confederate memorial still standing is a statue of Gen. A.P. Hill in an intersection on the north side of the city. Its removal is taking longer to plan because its namesake is buried, standing up, beneath the statue.