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Lee’s statue is gone. What it unleashed remains.

2023-10-29 00:00:00.0 华盛顿邮报-华盛顿特区原网页

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That it had to be done in secret says it all.

The Robert E. Lee statue that propelled white nationalists to wield torches and march through Charlottesville couldn’t be destroyed in a known place at a known time. Of course not.

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The foundry that agreed to melt down that oxidized metal — after others refused — couldn’t be publicly revealed. Of course not.

The people who witnessed the melting of that statue couldn’t keep the location trackers of their phones on. Of course not.

Charlottesville’s Lee statue meets its end, in a 2,250-degree furnace

A few days ago, The Washington Post published a detailed account of the end of the Confederate general’s statue, a structure that before it was removed from its pedestal had prompted public and persistent displays of hate. That statue was at the center of the Unite the Right rally in 2017 that drew white nationalists to Charlottesville. Remember that? They chanted things such as “Jews will not replace us!” and “White lives matter!” That day, punches were thrown, people were shoved and a man rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, injuring dozens and killing Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old with a passion for social justice.

After the rally, the statue pulled the community apart. People fought over it and around it. Protesters called for its removal and covered its base with graffiti. Lawsuits were filed to keep it in place, and lawsuits were filed to keep it from being melted. The Post’s story details what led up to its ultimate end: “The statue’s defenders more recently sought to block the city from handing Lee over to Charlottesville’s Black history museum, which proposed a plan to repurpose the metal. In a lawsuit, those plaintiffs suggested the century-old monument should remain intact or be turned into Civil War-style cannons.”

On Oct. 21, the museum went ahead with its plan, and on Thursday, after a 30-day window closed for the plaintiffs to appeal a decision by a judge to dismiss the lawsuit, they publicly spoke about the statue’s end at a news conference.

That action has caused people in recent days to applaud and complain across the country. That’s understandable. The issues statues bring to the surface are complex. But that statue, for the sake of community healing, needed to go away. It needed to be melted down until it was no longer recognizable or defendable. The women who led that effort through Swords Into Plowshares deserve our collective gratitude for taking on that undesirable task.

How that work took place shows what they were up against. While that statue is now gone, what it unleashed remains. That Lee statue emboldened racists, prompted public displays of violence and led to private threats — and those don’t melt down as easily as bronze.

One of the most powerful parts of The Post’s story comes at the beginning. The dateline reads, “SOMEWHERE IN THE U.S. SOUTH.” The secrecy that was needed to keep the people who organized and participated in the event safe is not just an interesting side note. It is revealing. It shows how risky it is in this country to take on Confederate statues.

The Black man who owned the foundry that ultimately melted down the statue described that work as an honor. He also didn’t want his identity revealed. He is quoted in the story as saying: “The risk is being targeted by people of hate, having my business damaged, having threats to family and friends.”

Those risks are important to acknowledge. They force us to recognize that the debate over Confederate symbols isn’t just about preserving or correcting history. It’s also about confronting present-day racism and choosing the future we want. Black people in Charlottesville and in other communities have been some of the people fighting hardest to remove those statues, and for that, they have faced threats that have gone unseen. They have found burning torches in their yards. They have discovered handwritten notes on their cars. They have been doxed.

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The Unite the Right rally is what gained the most national attention, but it’s not the only display of hate that went into the decision to break down that Lee statue in secrecy.

In the years that followed the rally, self-appointed guards clustered around the statue in the name of protecting it. They came armed with handguns and long guns, and they made a public space no longer feel welcoming to the public.

“It was very apparent, even after the Unite the Right rally, that this would just continue to be a beacon for haters. And that’s why we did this,” Jalane Schmidt, a University of Virginia religious studies professor, told me Friday. She and Andrea Douglas, the executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, lead the Swords Into Plowshares project.

By “this,” she means break down that statue into multiple pieces and move them privately to the foundry, where they were turned into ingots that will be used to create a piece of public artwork in Charlottesville.

Each community needs to decide for itself, after having an informed discussion, whether to remove or destroy confederate statues, she said. The decision to melt down the Lee statue and turn it into artwork, she said, was the right one “in our case, in our community, at this time.”

“We didn’t want to just send it down the road to another community,” she said. “That’s not responsible — to take your toxic waste, wash your hands of it and send it down the road. We don’t want anyone to be subjected to this.”

I asked her whether taking that action had drawn even more hate her way.

“Stuff was coming into my inbox this morning,” she said. “It comes with the territory for sure … But we’re not deterred. We know what they can do. We know what they are capable of. And we are still doing this.”

People are still fighting to keep Confederate statues standing. The question they are raising is a distraction from the one we should be asking.

Three years ago, I wrote about how debating about tributes to dead figures was keeping us from focusing on issues that could help living people. At the time, I wrote: “The removal of these statues is not about history, it’s about futures. Protesters are tearing them down across the country because they are fed up. They are tired of debating and discussing and waiting for people to show they are more invested in removing chains than honoring those figures who fought to keep others in them.”

Charlottesville now has a chance to move past the fighting and create from a piece of metal that divided a community a piece of art that can unite it.

It has the chance to confront the hate that made it necessary to destroy a statue in secret and publicly discuss what will help people in the community heal.

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