Charlottesville was quiet today.
The white supremacists and counter protesters have mostly gone home,
and UVA students won’t be arriving for fall semester until later this week.
Things are still eerie here,
but you do get a sense of solidarity from people walking around the mall downtown—
even if they’re still in shock.
What happened here has had an obvious impact across the country,
and officials in other Southern states have begun making urgent calls
to remove Confederate memorials before they become flashpoints of unrest and violence.
In Durham, authorities are considering criminal vandalism charges
against activists who took matters into their own hands on Monday
and took down a confederate memorial outside a courthouse.
But stripping the South of its confederate shrines
isn’t going to be simple, or easy.
Drive 30 miles north of Robert E. Lee Elementary School in Petersburg, Virginia
and you’ll cross over the Robert E. Lee Memorial Bridge
and into downtown Richmond,
where at the center of Lee Circle sits a bronze Robert E. Lee monument.
It’s one of three remaining statues dedicated solely to the confederate general,
including the one in Charlottesville that was at the center of this weekend’s protests.
Still, more than 100 historical markers carry his name.
Confederate monuments are, unsurprisingly,
concentrated in Southern states—
but the legacy of the Confederacy made its way as far west
as the Robert E. Lee Elementary School in East Wenatchee, Washington,
and the Robert E. Lee campgrounds in Boise, Idaho.
As of last year,
there were about 1,500 confederate symbols still in public spaces.
But why do all these monuments,
commemorating the side that lost the Civil War,
exist in the first place?
Professor Kirk Savage explains
that Confederate monuments first started popping up in the 1890s—
and they were never just tributes to fallen heroes.
— Confederate symbols surged in the early 20th century.
And in 1917, 52 years after the Civil War ended,
the Charlottesville statue of Lee was commissioned.
The statue reframes the narrative around the losing General
by presenting him in a position of power atop his horse, Traveller,
who was said to buck any black servant who tried to ride him.
— It’s basically a metaphor of command,
that the person riding the animal is the commander of the horse and therefore,
by extension, the commander of men.
Blacks who are almost never represented in the 19th century in sculpture
are put in a very different position—
typically a subordinate position.
It sort-of reinscribes forever the relation of white domination.
— And now, generations later,
people have come to see these statues as symbols of Southern power and dominance.
With their removal,
they feel their history is under threat.
— I understand how the removal a statue now
can be framed as “they’re stealing our history.”
And I think it’s a smart move, on their part.
But it’s a very false framing.
— And that’s why the decision to keep or remove these statues
has become so controversial.