Source: The Washington Post / Getty
A Virginia statute of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee is set to be melted down into new artwork after being recently removed from the city park where the “I heart negroes in chains” military commander was immortalized in the 1920s. Oh, we’re not talking about the Lee monument in Richmond, Va., that was finally removed last year, but that’s an easy mistake to make since, apparently, a lot of Virginians just really love their 30-foot odes to white supremacy.
But this one was in Charlottesville—you know, the city where a bunch of angry and probably sexually frustrated white men marched around with tiki torches until some deranged neo-Nazi killed a woman with his car. Apparently, they’re the types who also love sculpted slavery memorabilia. Go figure.
According to the Washington Post, the Charlottesville City Council voted 4-0 to donate the monument to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, which competed with other bidders who were interested in the statue. It’s probably a good thing that the heritage center got the statue instead of other interested parties because you just know there were probably rich white nationalist bidders who wanted to plant the monument in their backyard and slap a plaque on it that reads “Remember the good old days.” (Either that or they were going to tell their grandkids it’s a statue of two-term President Donald Trump.)
But the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center is planning to do great things with the monument—and by “great things” I mean “set that arts and KKKrafts project of fire, melt it down to the white Hell from whence it came and then mold it into a bronze chain and matching grill.” (I’m joking, that’s probably not what they’re going to turn it into. That’s what I would do though.)
According to Andrea Douglas, the executive director for the museum, the heritage center hasn’t yet revealed what the melted down statue will be rebirthed into except to say that it will be a “community-based shared project” that will be titled “Sword Into Plowshares,” and that the center hopes it will “create something that transforms what was once toxic in our public space into something beautiful and more reflective of our entire community’s social values.”
In other words: Out with the racist love busts created for slavers and traitors and in with something new and beautiful by and for Black people.
“It is a community-based project that all of the voices of our community will be able to articulate what we want in our public spaces,” Douglas said, the Daily Progress reported.
According to Blavity, “a meeting is slated to take place on Monday, Dec. 20, to vote on the remaining statues of Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Sacagawea, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.”
Listen: I’m just throwing ideas out there, but if they melted all of them down and molded them into a giant Black Lives Matter plaque, I wouldn’t be mad.
Just imagine the Virginian white tears.
