A Virginia judge will authorize a Charlottesville museum to melt down the city’s infamous statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee after rejecting key elements of a lawsuit seeking to preserve it. The monument was the site of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally which left many injured and the death of counter-protester Heather Heyer.
The case was brought by the Trevilian Station Battlefield Foundation, which operates a Civil War battlefield in Louisa County, Virginia, and the Ratcliffe Foundation, which operates a museum in the former home of fellow Confederate general JEB Stuart, in Russell County, Virginia.
The two organizations filed the suit shortly after the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center (JSAAHC) in Charlottesville won a bid to melt the bronze monument which is now 99 years old and uses it as raw material for a new public work of art. The Trevilian and Ratcliffe foundations had submitted their own unsuccessful bids to take control of the statue.
In May, the Ratcliffe Foundation was withdrawn from the lawsuit because its corporate status in the state had expired in 2015. Then last week, a circuit court judge ruled that two claims at the center of the Trevilian Station Battlefield Foundation case were invalid because the organization submitted its bid for the Lee statue too late.
The judge, however, left the door open for the foundation to sue the city of Charlottesville for allegedly violating Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act.
The statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee is moved to Charlottesville. Photo: John McDonnell/The Washington Post via Getty Images.
“The lawsuit always felt like an attempt to create a distraction from the whole project,” said Andrea Douglas, executive director of the JSAAHC, told the Washington Post. “Our goal is really to start a conversation about public space and how to create those public spaces in the most democratic way possible.”
American sculptor Henry Shrady was commissioned to create the Robert E. Lee Memorial in 1917. The project was taken over by Italian artist Leo Lentelli when Shrady died in 1922, and he completed it in 1924.
In 2017, the five-member Charlottesville City Council voted 3-2 to remove Lee’s memorial from view. The decision was later challenged in a lawsuit by several plaintiffs, including descendants of the statue’s donor, who claimed the removal of the object violated a state law that protects veterans’ monuments.
In 2019, a judge sided with the plaintiffs and issued a permanent injunction preventing the memorial from being removed. This decision was reversed by the Virginia Supreme Court in April 2021 and the injunction was lifted. Lee’s monument was finally dismantled July 10, 2021.
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