The statue — begun by Henry Merwin Shrady, a New York sculptor, and finished after his death by an Italian, Leo Lentelli — had stood in the city since 1924. But over the past couple of years some residents and city officials, along with organizations like the N.A.A.C.P., had called for it to come down.
One local official made a similar suggestion as early as 2012 and quickly discovered that emotions surrounding the issue run deep.It was during the Virginia Festival of the Book, a series of readings and events held every year in Albemarle County, which includes Charlottesville.
At a talk given by the author and historian Edward Ayers, a Charlottesville city councilor, Kristin Szakos, asked about the city’s Confederate monuments. She wondered whether the city should discuss removing them.
People around her gasped. “You would have thought I had asked if it was O.K. to torture puppies,” she recalled during a 2013 conversation on BackStory, a podcast supported by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities....
... By 2015, debates about Confederate flags and monuments were heating up in Southern states including South Carolina, Texas and Louisiana. Those who favored removal saw the symbols as monuments to white supremacy, but their opponents accused them of trying to erase history.
In Charlottesville that year, someone spray-painted “Black Lives Matter” on the foundation of the Lee statue. City workers cleaned it quickly, leaving only a faint outline.
By 2016, Wes Bellamy, another Charlottesville city councilor and the city’s vice mayor, had become a champion of efforts to remove Confederate monuments. At a news conference in front of the Lee statue in March of that year, he said the City Council would appoint a commission to discuss the issue...
...That same month, Zyahna Bryant, a high school student, petitioned the City Council asking for the Lee statue to be removed. “My peers and I feel strongly about the removal of the statue because it makes us feel uncomfortable and it is very offensive,” she wrote in the petition, which collected hundreds of signatures.
The City Council established its special commission in May 2016. Later that year, it issued a report suggesting that the city could either relocate the Lee statue or transform it with the “inclusion of new accurate historical information.
The addition of historical context might have been welcomed by some defenders of the statues. One group, Friends of C’Ville Monuments, said on its website that statues could be improved “by adding more informative, better detailed explanations of the history of the statues and what they can teach us.”
But in February, the City Council voted to remove the statue from the park. Opponents of the move sued in March, arguing that the city did not have the authority to do so under state law.
That court case is continuing, and the statue has remained in place.”
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