Museums, battlefields and at least 18 private citizens want to acquire statue of Confederate General Robert E Lee that sparked deadly Charlottesville Unite the Right rally
- The statue, which was located in Market Street Park in Charlottesville, Virginia, was removed July 10
- Its removal was confirmed 4 years after the city's council voted on the removal in February 2017, following a petition started by a high school student
- That decision that sparked the 'Unite the Right' where James Alex Fields, 24, intentionally plowed his car into a crowd of people, killing Heather Heyer in 2017
- Now, at least 13 organizations and one municipality have expressed interest in acquiring Lee's statue, according to city documents
- The city also received at least 18 expressions of interest from private citizens across the country
- In addition to Lee's statue, interest has also flooded in regarding Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson's statue, which was removed alongside Lee's in July
An infamous statute of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, which helped trigger the violent 'Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville in 2017 has been being sought by multiple groups and private citizens after its removal.
The statue, which was located in Market Street Park in Charlottesville, Virginia, was removed July 10 - and has since attracted interests from individuals, arts groups and museums who wish to preserve it.
Newly-shared documents show that least 13 organizations and one municipality have expressed interest in acquiring Lee's statue, according to city documents.
Many of those organizations appear keen to display the monument alongside other exhibits explaining the history of racism in southern US states.
The city also received at least 18 expressions of interest from private citizens across the country.
In addition to Lee's statue, interest has also flooded in regarding Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson's statue, which was removed alongside Lee's earlier this month.
The infamous statute of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, (pictured) which helped trigger the violent 'Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville four years ago, is being sought by multiple groups and private citizens.
Museums, battlefields and historical sites in Virginia and beyond expressed interest in the statues of Gen. Robert E. Lee and Gen. Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson that were according to the documents acquired by The Daily Progress.
The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center is the only Charlottesville-area entity that expressed interest.
The city accepted a resident´s offer to donate land for parks for both statues, in 1918.
The Jackson statue was erected in 1921 and the Lee statue was erected in 1924, during the Jim Crow era when black Americans´ rights were being stripped away.
LAXART, an art museum in Los Angeles, also expressed interest and submitted a proposal to include the statues as the centerpiece of an upcoming exhibit featuring decommissioned Confederate monuments alongside contemporary art.
The town of Goshen in Rockbridge County asked to acquire the statues for free to place in front of its newly constructed community center to attract tourists.
Earlier this month, the Lee statue was removed from its plinth - four years after the city's council first voted to do so in February 2017, following a petition started by black high school student, Zyahna Bryant.
Workers remove the monument of Confederate General Robert E. Lee on Saturday, July 10, 2021 in Charlottesville, Va. The removal of the Lee statue follows years of contention, community anguish and legal fights
Workers prepare to remove the monument of Confederate General Robert E. Lee on Saturday, July 10, 2021 in Charlottesville, Va. The removal of the Lee statue follows years of contention, community anguish and legal fights
It was a decision that sparked the 'Unite the Right' rally -- led by white supremacists and neo-Nazis -- where white supremacist James Alex Fields, 24, intentionally plowed his Dodge Challenger car into a crowd of people on August 12, 2017, killing protester Heather Heyer, 32 and leaving others with life-altering injuries.
In June 2019, Fields was sentenced to life in prison on federal hate crime charges.
In the aftermath of the rally, Charlottesville residents unleashed a torrent of pain, anger and frustration at city and state officials, laying bare deeper issues about race, economic inequality and what should be done to move forward.
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In addition to Lee's statue, interest has also flooded in regarding Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson's statue, which was removed alongside Lee's earlier this month.
The monument of Stonewall Jackson is prepared to be lifted from its pedestal on Saturday, July 10, 2021 in Charlottesville, Va. The removal of the Lee and Jackson statues comes nearly four years after violence erupted at the infamous "Unite the Right" rally
The monument of Stonewall Jackson is hauled away on Saturday, July 10, 2021 in Charlottesville, Va. The removal of the Lee and Jackson statues comes nearly four years after violence erupted at the infamous "Unite the Right" rally
White supremacists brawled in the streets with anti-racist counterprotesters as police largely stood by and watched. Seen in this picture, anti-racist protestors clash with white supremacists during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017
More than a dozen people were injured when Fields plowed into the growds
Others interested in the monuments include the Jim Crow Museum in Big Rapids, Michigan; the Gettysburg Sculpture Museum in Pennsylvania; the Ogletree Estate in Cornelia, Georgia; Hot Springs National Park in Arkansas; the Confederate Gen. Robert Toombs Camp in Higgston, Georgia; and the Controversial Art Trust in Charlotte, North Carolina.
The Charlottesville City Council still has not decided whether ownership of the statues should be transferred to a museum or other entity or whether the statues should be permanently destroyed.
On July 13, the city said July 13 that it would continue to accept statements of interest from entities interested in acquiring them.
In early September, the mayor will conduct outreach with the interested parties to further evaluate their interest and resources.
Under the new law, the city has the final say in the statues' disposition.
Both are being stored in a secure location on city property until the City Council makes a final decision.
Activists have since pushed the city to address its legacies of racism and slavery, its dearth of affordable housing and policing, among other issues.
Kristin Szakos, who was a City Council member at the time of the rally, said in an interview earlier this week that there was a determination to make sure the violence of 2017 was not in vain.
'It really brought up a lot of awareness of white supremacy that is not just from visitors from Idaho, but also from structures in our own culture and in our own institutions that we have to deal with. And that those are more important than just chasing Nazis out of our town,' she said.
Szakos, no longer in office, said she thinks the city has made some progress toward that work and that the statue removals will be another step in the right direction.
City officials have said they plan to redesign the park spaces where the statues are located 'in a way that promotes healing and that tells a more complete history of Charlottesville.'
Who was Confederate general and slave owner Robert E. Lee?
A portrait of Confederate general Robert E. Lee
Robert E. Lee was a decorated Confederate general.
He joined the army in 1825, and graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1829.
He married Mary Anna Randolph Custis, the only daughter of George Washington Parke Custis, the grandson of Martha Washington, in 1831.
Lee first saw action with the American military in Mexico in 1846. He later served as major general of Virginia’s state forces.
He inherited the Virginia mansion when his father-in-law died in 1857, leaving Lee to manage the large estate.
The estate was in disarray and Lee ended up taking a two year leave of absence from the army to re-organize the flailing plantation.
He had extremely strict expectations of his slaves and exacted harsh punishments for those who fell short.
His efforts led to near slave revolts on site, especially as many believed they would be released on Custis' death.
In 1859, Lee severely punished three slaves - Wesley Norris, his sister Mary, and a cousin of theirs - after they tried to escape the plantation.
A newspaper at the time claimed Lee had them whipped once they were captured and returned to Virginia.
Mary received 20 lashes while the two men received 50 before the pair were sent to work on railroads in Virginia and Alabama.
Many of the 200 slaves he had inherited were either sold to traders or jailed by Lee and by 1860, only one family remained intact.
He is believed to have told his son in 1868: 'You will never prosper with the blacks, and it is abhorrent to a reflecting mind to be supporting and cherishing those who are plotting and working for your injury, and all of whose sympathies and associations are antagonistic to yours.'
After the Civil War, Lee resisted efforts to build Confederate monuments in his honor and instead wanted the nation to move on from the Civil War.
After his death, Southerners adopted 'The Lost Cause' revisionist narrative about the Civil War and placed Lee as its central figure. The Last Cause argued the South knew it was fighting a losing war and decided to fight it anyway on principle. It also tried to argue that the war was not about slavery but high constitutional ideals.
As The Lost Cause narrative grew in popularity, proponents pushed to memorialize Lee, ignoring his deficiencies as a general and his role as a slave owner. Lee monuments went up in the 1920s just as the Ku Klux Klan was experiencing a resurgence and new Jim Crow segregation laws were adopted.
The Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, went up in 1924. A year later, the U.S. Congress voted to use federal funds to restore the Lee mansion in the Arlington National Cemetery.
The U.S. Mint issued a coin in his honor, and Lee has been on five postage stamps. No other Union figure besides President Abraham Lincoln has similar honors.
A generation after the civil rights movement, black and Latino residents began pressuring elected officials to dismantle Lee and other Confederate memorials in places like New Orleans, Houston and South Carolina.
The removals partly were based on violent acts committed white supremacists using Confederate imagery and historians questioning the legitimacy of The Lost Cause.
A Gen. Robert E. Lee statue was removed from Lee Circle in New Orleans as the last of four monuments to Confederate-era figures to be removed under a 2015 City Council vote.
The Houston Independent School District also voted in 2016 to rename Robert E. Lee High School, a school with a large Latino population, as Margaret Long Wisdom High School.
In this June 30, 2015, photo, activists gather around the Confederate Army Gen. Robert E. Lee statute at Lee Park chanting the names of Civil War era activists in Dallas
The Charlottesville, Virginia, City Council voted to remove its Lee statue from a city park, sparking a lawsuit from opponents of the move. The debate also drew opposition from white supremacists and neo-Nazis who revered Lee and the Confederacy.
Monuments and memorials to Lee remain hugely controversial. Currently Virginia's Supreme Court is hearing arguments on whether the state has the right to take down a statue of Lee on a horse in Richmond.
The monument, which depicts the controversial general mounted on a horse, was dedicated in 1890 and has been the topic of fierce debate in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, for decades. Protesters gathered around the monument last year and defaced it with graffiti and spray paint decrying the death of George Floyd.
In December, a statue of Lee in the U.S. Capitol was removed and replaced with one of civil rights pioneer Barbara Johns. It was removed after Virginia Governor Ralph Northam requested it be swapped because Lee was not seen as a fitting symbol for the state.
There has also been calls to change the name of military bases, including one named after Lee - Fort Lee -, that bear the names of slave owners.
