Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue has met its end, in a 2,250-degree furnace.
The divisive Confederate monument, the focus of the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, was secretly melted down and will become a new piece of public art.
More on the process:… pic.twitter.com/XatZUfvku3
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 26, 2023
We’re at the cross-quarter season when the veil between the dead and the living is said to be at its thinnest — a good time to face bad memories and let them go. I’m gonna call this a feel-good story, a little treat for the weekend [unpaywalled gift link]:
SOMEWHERE IN THE U.S. SOUTH — It was a choice to melt down Robert E. Lee. But it would have been a choice to keep him intact, too.
So the statue of the Confederate general that once stood in Charlottesville — the one that prompted the deadly Unite the Right rally in 2017 — was now being cut into fragments and dropped into a furnace, dissolving into a sludge of glowing bronze.
Six years ago, groups with ties to the Confederacy had sued to stop the monument from being taken down. Torch-bearing white nationalists descended on the Virginia college town to protest its removal, and one man drove his car through a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 35 others.
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.
But on Saturday the museum went ahead with its plan in secret at this small Southern foundry outside Virginia, in a town and state The Washington Post agreed not to name because of participants’ fears of violence.
Swords Into Plowshares, a project led by the two women, will turn bronze ingots made from molten Lee into a new piece of public artwork to be displayed in Charlottesville. They made arrangements for Lee to be melted down while they started collecting ideas from city residents for that new sculpture.
Given past threats to the project and worries about legal action, Douglas, Schmidt and other organizers who traveled to this foundry in the American South took great pains to keep this part of the process under wraps. Only a few dozen people, including some who had housed or transported the dismembered figure of Lee, were invited to watch alongside them in secret. They announced the feat at a news conference Thursday afternoon in Charlottesville…
Some said the statue was being destroyed. Others called it a restoration. Depending on whom you asked, the bronze was being reclaimed, disrupted, or redeemed to a higher purpose. It was a grim act of justice and a celebration all in one….
End of An Icon (Treason in Defense of Slavery Version)Post + Comments (107)