Workers took down the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Richmond. Last week, the Virginia state supreme court paved the way for its removal.
Richmond's Lee statue was one of the largest monuments to the Confederacy. The Confederacy was a breakaway group of southern states that supported slavery in the 1861–1865 Civil War against the Union. Such monuments are widely seen in the US as outdated symbols of racism and oppression.
Hundreds gathered on Monument Avenue to watch as construction workers strapped harnesses around Lee and the horse on which he was mounted. One worker in an orange vest counted down, and —amid cheers from the crowd — the equestrian statue of Lee was hoisted off the plinth..
Plinth is expected to remain, but workers are due to remove decorative plaques and extricate a time capsule from underneath the site. The capsule, buried at the time the monument was erected, is to be replaced with a new one.
Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin put a knee on his neck for more than eight minutes. The statue had stood alongside three other Confederate monuments which came down last summer in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. The 46-year-old Black man died as Minneapolis police officers put a knees on him.
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam ordered statue's removal last summer following death of George Floyd. But state law protected monuments to war veterans. The law changed last year with a newly-elected Democratic majority in the statehouse. Last week, the Virginia state supreme court ruled that the statue could be removed.
Northam said it represented, "more than 400 years of history that we should not be proud of" The statue itself had transformed since the killing of George Floyd into a hub for protests and the granite base on which the equestrian statue stood covered in anti-police and anti-racism graffiti.
Gary Flowers, a Black radio show host and activist, said he planned to celebrate Wednesday night surrounded by pictures of his late ancestors with thoughts in his head and heart. "As a native of Richmond, I want to say that the head of the snake has been removed," he told the New York Times.
"I was naïvely thinking that we could keep these statues and just add new ones to show the true history, and everything would be fine," said Cantor. "Now I understand the resentment that folks have toward these monuments, I don't think they can exist anymore," he said.
Quelle: FreiesNachrichtenblatt.com
