Description
The Robert E. Lee Monument was an outdoor bronze equestrian statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee and his horse Traveller located in Charlottesville, Virginia's Market Street Park (formerly Emancipation Park, and before that Lee Park) in the Charlottesville and Albemarle County Courthouse Historic District. The statue was commissioned in 1917 and dedicated in 1924, and in 1997 was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was removed on July 10, 2021.
In February 2017, as part of the movement for the removal of Confederate monuments and memorials, the Charlottesville City Council voted 3-2 for the statue's removal, along with the Stonewall Jackson statue, and for the Lee Park to be renamed. The removal proposal generated controversy. A lawsuit was filed on March 20, 2017, and in May 2017 a temporary injunction against its removal was granted by a judge, citing a Virginia state law that blocked the removal. White supremacists organized the Unite the Right rally for August 2017 to protest the proposed removal that drew numerous far-right groups, and during which 32-year-old Heather Heyer was murdered. On August 23, 2017, the council had the statue shrouded in black, which in February 2018 a judge ordered removed. In July 2019 a permanent injunction was granted and in July 2020 the state law was amended to remove the grounds for objection raised by the judge. The Virginia Supreme Courtlifted the injunction in April 2021, holding that the state law thought to restrict the removal did not apply retroactively to statutes passed before its effect (the law was applied to Virginia cities in 1997, but the statute had been erected in 1924). However, rather than immediately remove the statute, the city opted to employ the new removal process authorized under the law's 2020 amendments, which entails public notice, a public hearing after thirty days, and thirty days to field offers for relocation of the statue. On July 9, 2021, the City Council announced that the Lee Statue would be removed the following day. On Saturday July 10, 2021 the city removed the statues of General Lee and Stonewall Jackson.