Removal and Repurposing Frameworks. Explore definitions here.
Monuments at a Glance: Charlottesville’s Confederate and Settler Colonial Monuments
| Monument | At Ready (“Johnny Reb”) |
| Location | Charlottesville, Virginia |
| Region | USA |
| Funders | The City of Charlottesville and the United Daughters of the Confederacy |
| Date of construction | May 5, 1909 |
| Remain in original location? | No |
| Date removed | September 12, 2020 |
| Current disposition | Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation, New Market, Virginia |
| Opposition and support | Detractors claim that the monument is a relic of the Lost Cause ideology whose location on the grounds of the Albemarle Circuit Court is intended to intimidate Black people. Supporters claim that the monument simply honors Confederate veterans. |
| Framework | Removal: Following a unanimous vote by the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors in August 2020, the monument and the two cannons that once flanked it were removed on September 12, 2020.
Relocation: The monument is now housed at the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation, a National Park site. |
| Monument | Thomas Jefferson |
| Location | Charlottesville, Virginia |
| Region | USA |
| Funders | Moses Jacob Ezekiel, University of Virginia |
| Date of construction | 1910 |
| Remain in original location? | Yes |
| Date removed | N/A |
| Current disposition | The monument remains sited at the Rotunda on the University of Virginia campus. |
| Opposition and support | Detractors claim that Jefferson, as a white supremacist who owned some 600 enslaved people of African descent during his lifetime—including Sally Hemings, the mother of six of his children—should not be venerated on the University of Virginia campus. Supporters claim that the monument to Jefferson is valid, based on his status as the founder of the university and the third US President. |
| Framework | Status Quo: The monument remains in place at the time of writing. |
| Monument | Their First View of the Pacific (Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Sacajawea) |
| Location | Charlottesville, Virginia |
| Region | USA |
| Funder | Paul Goodloe McIntire |
| Date of construction | 1919 |
| Remain in original location? | No |
| Date removed | July 10, 2021 |
| Current disposition | Lewis & Clark Exploratory Center, Charlottesville, Virginia |
| Opposition and support | Detractors claim that the monument depicts Sacajawea in racist, demeaning caricature that is offensive to her ancestors as well as to Indigenous people writ large. They also claim that the monument minimizes Sacajawea’s critical role in the safe return of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Some historians claim that Sacajawea is actually depicted tracking, rather than cowering. |
| Framework | Removal: Sacajawea’s descendants, including Rose Ann Abrahamson, launched a 10-year campaign to remove the monument. During a special session on July 10, 2021, the Charlottesville City Council voted unanimously to remove it. Removal took place later that day.
The fate of the statue, which is currently being stored at the Lewis & Clark Exploratory Center in Charlottesville, remains undecided. City officials have promised to consult Sacajawea’s descendants regarding its disposition. |
| Monument | George Rogers Clark |
| Location | Charlottesville, Virginia |
| Region | USA |
| Funder | Paul Goodloe McIntire |
| Date of construction | 1921 |
| Remain in original location? | No |
| Date removed | July 10, 2021 |
| Current disposition | In storage at an undisclosed location |
| Opposition and support | Detractors claim that the sculpture valorizes land theft and Indigenous genocide in its valiant portrayal of military officer and “Conqueror” George Rogers Clark. They also claim that it depicts Native Americans in racist, demeaning caricature. |
| Framework | Removal: During a special session on July 10, 2021, the Charlottesville City Council voted unanimously to remove the George Rogers Clark monument from Monument Square at the University of Virginia. University officials removed it on July 11, 2021.
As of April 2022, a committee co-chaired by a citizen of the Monacan nation and a University of Virginia faculty member has been tasked to consult representatives of 13 Native American tribes about the monument’s future. |
| Monument | Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson |
| Location | Charlottesville, Virginia |
| Region | USA |
| Funder | Paul Goodloe McIntire |
| Date of construction | October 19, 1921 |
| Remain in original location? | No |
| Date removed | July 10, 2021 |
| Current disposition | The Brick Los Angeles, California |
| Opposition and support | Detractors claim that the Jackson monument is a symbol of white supremacy intended to terrorize Black people and spread Confederate propaganda. Supporters claim that it is a symbol of Southern pride and white “heritage.” |
| Framework | Removal: During a special session on July 10, 2021, the Charlottesville City Council voted unanimously to remove the monument. It was removed later that day.
Reinterpretation: In December 2021, the City Council awarded custody of the statue to The Brick, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit arts organization, for display in its MONUMENTS exhibit slated for 2025. The Brick will partner with the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art to feature decommissioned Confederate monuments alongside existing and newly commissioned artworks. |
| Monument | Robert E. Lee |
| Location | Charlottesville, Virginia |
| Region | USA |
| Funder | Paul Goodloe McIntire |
| Date of construction | May 21, 1924 |
| Remain in original location? | No |
| Date removed | July 10, 2021 |
| Current disposition | Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, Charlottesville, Virginia |
| Opposition and support | Detractors claim that the Lee monument is a symbol of white supremacy intended to terrorize Black people and spread Confederate propaganda. Supporters claim that it is a symbol of Southern pride and white “heritage.” The conflict over the Lee monument culminated in the violent Unite the Right rally on August 11-12, 2017. |
| Framework | Removal: During a special session on July 10, 2021, the Charlottesville City Council voted unanimously to remove the monument. It was removed later that day.
Repurposing: In December 2021, the City Council awarded custody of the Lee monument to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center (JSAAHC). The JSAAHC directs the Swords Into Plowshares project, a community-led effort to melt down the Lee monument and repurpose the metal for a new public artwork. Swords Into Plowshares is soliciting artistic proposals for the raw bronze material and will impanel a jury to select a finalist sometime in 2024. The steering committee hopes to have the new artwork completed and installed by 2027—the 10th anniversary of Charlottesville’s Summer of Hate. |
Introduction
Centuries before Charlottesville’s Confederate monuments were erected during Jim Crow, a lesser-known memorial stood at the city’s northern edge. Since at least the late 17th century, a burial mound beneath the floodplain of the Rivanna River has honored the dead of the Monacan Indian Nation (Ivy Creek Natural Area, n.d.). The burial mound, which once stood about 12 feet tall, has long since vanished as centuries of settler farming leveled the area’s hills (Monacan Indian Nation, n.d.). Today, much of Monasukapanough—once a vibrant Monacan village—is covered by a soccer field, a grim monument of sorts to settler colonial conquest.
Until recently, the visual language of conquest has defined Confederate monument sites across the United States, principally in the South. Between 1877 and 1964, 1,910 Confederate memorials were erected in Southern states. While the term “monument” here refers exclusively to statuary, plaques, and non-habitable structures, the broader term “memorial” encompasses roadways and bridges; schools; counties and municipalities; parks; civic buildings; holidays; military bases; bodies of water; and even commemorative license plates. All of these material forms do cultural work to reinforce the values of the Confederacy. Of the 1,910 Confederate memorials, some 830 monuments depict Confederate military officers in stately bronze statuary, often situated in or near prominent civic spaces and institutions. Yet, in communities across the South where Confederate statuary was once enshrined now sit weedy mounds of dirt. Graffitied granite plinths remain at some sites, while at others handmade plaques spell out fleeting messages. Parks, bridges, highways, and high schools named after Confederate generals have been renamed after civil rights icons and Indigenous peoples. A century after their erection in public space, many American monuments of oppression are officially defunct.
Drawing from historical and ethnographic materials collected during the summer of 2023, this case study traces the spatial and psychic scars of six monuments of oppression that stood in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the course of a century. The Monuments Toolkit Project defines monuments of oppression as:
Any monument constructed to purposefully perpetuate fear, inaccurate tellings of history, racism, or xenophobia, and any monuments that communities have determined to be oppressive or harmful to their communities.
As symbols of white supremacy, Confederate and settler colonial monuments are exemplary monuments of oppression. In Charlottesville, the Monuments Toolkit Project recognizes six such monuments: At Ready (“Johnny Reb”) (1909); Thomas Jefferson (1910); Their First View of the Pacific (Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Sacajawea) (1919); George Rogers Clark (1921); Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson (1921); and Robert E. Lee (1924) (Higgins, 2020). In the aftermath of Charlottesville’s Summer of Hate in August 2017, only one of these six monuments, Thomas Jefferson at the University of Virginia (UVA) Rotunda, remains in place. Before exploring the storied afterlives of these artifacts, it is important to touch on their shared social history.
Section 1: Origin Myths
In simple terms, Confederate monuments are materializations of the Lost Cause ideology. This ideology was based on a pseudohistorical negationist myth that recast the Confederacy’s defeat in a war to uphold the institution of slavery as a virtuous defense of “the Southern way of life.” In this mythic revision of American Civil War history, the “Old South” is a euphemism for a brutal racial caste system that economically powered plantation capitalism via the stolen labor of enslaved people of African descent. The true motives for the war—to preserve that system and its attendant wealth transfer to white elites—are repackaged as noble stewardship of regional culture. By cleverly rebranding animus and avarice as “heritage,” the Lost Cause narrative sanitizes the white supremacy baked into expressions of Southern Confederate pride.
A principal goal of the Lost Cause ideology was to dignify Confederate insurrectionists as patriotic war heroes. To that end, proponents pursued a multifaceted propaganda campaign that featured monumental sculpture as its primary medium. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, Confederate memorials were largely limited to cemeteries, where they collectively honored dead troops via commemorative plaques and obelisks. That changed with the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the beginning of state-sanctioned racial segregation under Jim Crow. Mapping neatly onto the Jim Crow era (1877-1964), Confederate monuments grew larger and grander as they proliferated across the South in three distinct waves.
The first and largest wave began in the mid-1890s soon after Southern states enacted sweeping laws to disenfranchise Black Americans and segregate society. During this prolific period, which lasted until the 1920s, over 400 monuments were erected as part of the Lost Cause propaganda campaign. The second wave of Confederate monuments followed from the 1920s to the 1940s as Black Americans pushed for inclusion in civil rights and labor law. The third wave occurred during the 1950s and 1960s amid widespread backlash to desegregation and the increasing momentum of the civil rights movement.
White women were instrumental in the campaign to build Confederate monuments. The Southern Poverty Law Center (2022) attributes some 450 memorials to the fundraising efforts of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), an advocacy group for female descendants of Confederate soldiers. Members of the South’s most prominent families, the Daughters—as they will be referred to throughout this study—devoted themselves to promoting what they considered “a truthful history” of the Civil War—one that vindicated Confederate men and transformed humiliation into honor (Holloway, 2018). In her definitive monograph on the UDC, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, historian Karen L. Cox (2003) shows just how central monuments were to the Daughters’ Lost Cause evangelism. Since its founding in 1894, the UDC has successfully lobbied to erect monuments in almost every city, town, and state of the former Confederacy, out-fundraising their white male counterparts, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, by significant margins. Just a few years after it evolved from ladies’ memorial association and sewing circles across the South, the UDC had established itself as the preeminent neo-Confederate interest group in the United States.
Monuments were the most visible component of the Daughters’ propaganda campaign to claim authorship of Civil War history. While the UDC focused its efforts to that end in Southern states, they also erected imposing edifices on landscapes of national significance, such as the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. Among the 32 life-sized figures depicted on this monument’s mount is a Black “mammy” holding a white baby as another white child tugs at her skirt. By aestheticizing the trope of the “faithful Black servant” on the grounds of a national landmark, the Arlington Cemetery Confederate Memorial legitimates the lie that slavery was a benevolent institution. In this way, national Confederate monuments enshrined Lost Cause ideology on landscapes visited by thousands of Northerners. As Cox (2003) argues, however, the desire to impress Northerners, while important to the UDC, was not the primary goal of its monument campaign. Rather, the Daughters were centrally concerned with indoctrinating younger generations with the falsehoods of the Lost Cause.
Arguing for the need to build grand tributes to Confederate men, former UDC President General Rassie White declared in 1913 that monuments ought to show (white) children that their ancestors were not “cowards… unworthy of remembrance” (Cox, 2003). The Daughters’ Franklin, Tennessee, chapter stated outright that Confederate monuments were not intended for “strangers” but for Southern (white) youth. In fact, the Franklin chapter installed its monument in the town square so that local children “might know by daily observation of this monument” the (lost) cause for which their ancestors fought (ibid.). White children moreover centrally featured in dedication ceremonies, where they sang “Dixie,” the de facto Confederate anthem; formed a “living” battle flag with color-coordinated outfits; and even unveiled statues with a theatrical tug. In the mid-1950s, the Daughters formalized their youth indoctrination efforts with the creation of the Children of the Confederacy, an auxiliary chapter of the UDC.
While the Daughters’ prolific erection of Confederate monuments remains their most concrete achievement, the impact of their pedagogical activities cannot be overstated. Soon after its founding in 1894, the UDC dedicated itself to combating what one Texas Daughter called “wicked falsehoods” about Civil War history. Many Daughters were amateur historians who wrote historical novels and textbooks for use in Southern schools. Their own curricular materials prove, however, that it was in fact the Daughters who trafficked in falsehoods, including the preposterous claims that enslaved Black Americans “were faithful and devoted” and “always ready and willing to serve” (Stone, 1904). In these accounts, the “War between the States” pitted a genteel, agrarian South against a belligerent, industrialized North that defied Southern sovereignty. Daughters characterized such propaganda as “correct,” “authentic,” and “impartial,” in contrast to “biased” histories authored by Northerners, which supposedly villainized Confederate troops and overlooked the sacrifices of Southern women.
While white men may have fought for Dixie on the battlefield, it was white women who waged its ideological battle. Through their monument campaign and pedagogical activities, the UDC weaponized public schools and spaces—including nationally significant ones—as vectors of pro-Confederate propaganda. Crucially, in the process, they aestheticized the Lost Cause ideology, enshrining white supremacy, masculinity, and militancy in the built environment. What began as seemingly innocuous “women’s work” largely confined to Confederate cemeteries became, after Reconstruction, a Trojan horse to smuggle white supremacist symbols into public space. As UVA Professor of Religion Dr. Jalane Schmidt explains, “When the [UDC] started taking this form of memorialization, which had been saved for the grieving, out into the public square, that’s when we see the start of Confederate propagandizing” (Holloway, 2018).
Instead of honoring anonymous fallen soldiers, Confederate monuments dedicated during Jim Crow venerated political and military leaders like General Robert E. Lee; former President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis; and General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. In fact, these three men were the most memorialized Confederate leaders, in the aforementioned order. In contrast to earlier war memorials placed in cemeteries, Jim Crow-era monuments depict their subjects in valiant, swaggering relief—typically brandishing a rifle or astride a muscular horse. Also in contrast to their stone predecessors, Confederate memorial sculpture was cast in bronze and installed atop marble or granite plinths such that the object towered over the viewer, invoking awe. The statues themselves could measure upwards of 20 feet, and plinths could raise their height to 60 feet or more, as seen in the Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond, Virginia. As their fine materials and formidable stature suggest, Confederate monuments did not simply depict their subjects—they deified them.
No longer relegated to spaces of mourning, Jim Crow-era monuments were situated on the grounds of prominent civic spaces and institutions such as courthouses, universities, public parks, and town squares. Their placement at such sites was no accident. A bronze-cast Confederate soldier standing at ready in front of a courthouse, for example, signaled to Black Americans that they should not expect equal treatment under the law. In this way, Confederate monuments emblematized the Jim Crow racial hierarchy in American civic life.
Far from anodyne tributes to fallen soldiers, Jim Crow-era Confederate monuments were emblems of racial terror. According to the American Historical Association, Confederate memorials erected post-1877 “were intended, in part, to obscure the terrorism required to overthrow Reconstruction, and to intimidate African Americans politically and isolate them from the mainstream of public life” (Little, 2017). With the end of Reconstruction in 1877, white backlash to Black social progress erupted in the form of vigilante violence across the South, and to a lesser extent in border and midwestern states. As white supremacist violence proliferated across the region in subsequent decades, so too did Confederate monuments. In fact, the Equal Justice Initiative’s (2020) comprehensive study on racial terror lynching in the United States found a positive correlation between the number of lynchings of African Americans in a given county and the number of Confederate memorializations in that county. Simply put, as racial terror lynchings violently enforced the Jim Crow social order, Confederate monuments enshrined it in public space.
Yet the Lost Cause ideology papers over the power of Confederate monuments as symbols of white supremacy. To this day, the United Daughters of the Confederacy continue to advance an “alternative facts” version of American history that denies the racial animus embedded in Confederate iconography. Though the South lost the Civil War militarily, they succeeded in winning control over the ideology surrounding the war in the region.
Perhaps the best indicator of that ideological victory is the extent to which Confederate objects of veneration have, over time, paradoxically become unremarkable, blending into the landscape of the built environment. In this way, Confederate monuments normalize white supremacy as a background feature of everyday life.
That symbolic status quo has proven fragile, however, as one muggy summer in Charlottesville made painfully clear. The next section will focus on the specific case of Charlottesville to look at the art-historical context behind a handful of statues at the center of a social movement.
Section 2: “Fashioned by Yankees” yet “well done”
Of the 50 states, Virginia, home of the Confederate capital, Richmond, once claimed the largest number of Confederate monuments, 75 of which were positioned in front of county courthouses. In downtown Charlottesville, two of these—At Ready and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson—were situated on the grounds of the Albemarle Circuit Court.
The city’s first Confederate monument, formally named At Ready but popularly dubbed “Johnny Reb,” was erected in 1909 directly in front of the courthouse at the intersection of East Jefferson Street and 5th Street Northeast. Named after the national personification of the common Confederate soldier, Johnny Reb depicts a bronze-cast Confederate combatant perched atop a concrete plinth embellished with bronze-cast battle flags, rifle raised diagonally across his lower torso. Flanked by two Napoleon cannons, the statue exudes belligerence, standing “at ready” to police access to justice.
The visual language of bodies in space is significant in Confederate memorial statuary. Johnny Reb is figured in a classical pose known in art history as contrapposto (“counterpose” in Italian): a lifelike stance in which the body’s weight rests on one leg such that the opposite hip rises to produce a soft curve. Contrapposto first appears in Ancient Greek statuary and remains popular through the Italian Renaissance and Neoclassical period in both painting and sculpture, and particularly in religious art (Sincuba, 2022). Figures standing in contrapposto exhibit idealized proportions and often portray saints, gods, athletes, and warriors who are typically young, male, and nude (National Galleries Scotland, n.d.). In the case of Johnny Reb, the stance conveys belligerence but also references the aesthetic conventions of religious iconography, subliminally signaling deification.
Despite Johnny Reb’s exalted pose, there was nothing particularly unique about him. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, opportunistic foundries in the Northeast and Midwest mass-produced thousands of identical bronze statues and shipped them to cities all over the US. Charlottesville’s Johnny Reb was ironically forged in Chicago, Illinois, also known as the Land of Lincoln. At the dedication ceremony on May 5, 1909, a speaker evidently conceded that although the statue was “fashioned by Yankees,” the craftsmanship was nevertheless “well done” (Schmidt, 2019). \
Purchasers of generic soldier statues could customize them to suit regional particulars. The belt buckle, for example, could be inscribed with “USA” for Northern patrons or “CSA” for Southern patrons (Correcting the Narrative, 2020). Via this minor modification, the interchangeable soldier transformed into “Billy Yank” or “Johnny Reb,” respectively. Whereas Billy Yanks were erected in Northern cities to commemorate the postwar reunification of the United States, Johnny Rebs were erected in Southern cities to propagate the Lost Cause ideology. In this way, At Ready statues were ultimately monuments to American capitalism.
The second Confederate monument enshrined on the grounds of the Albemarle Circuit Court was no anonymous soldier. Dedicated on October 19, 1921, in what was then known as Jackson Park, the monument venerated Confederate General Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, second-in-command of the Confederate Army. Jackson’s tactical prowess became part of his legacy following his accidental death by friendly fire in 1863, acquiring mythical status in the Lost Cause ideology. Sculptor Charles Keck designed the monument to be the focal point of the park, and studied Virginia-bred horses as well as the Virginia saddle to lend the sculpture regional detail (UVA Law Library, n.d.). The imposing bronze statue depicts General Jackson saddled atop a trotting horse whose contrapposto stance recalls classical religious statuary. The sculpture is supported by a 13-foot-tall pink granite pedestal adorned with a pair of pendant swords and the winged figures of Valor and Faith (Cvillepedia, n.d.).
The Jackson monument was commissioned by local stockbroker and philanthropist Paul Goodloe McIntire, who also donated three other monuments of oppression to the City of Charlottesville (Robert E. Lee, George Rogers Clark, and Their First View of the Pacific). Like the Jackson sculpture, Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee monument was situated in a park near a significant social institution. McIntire purchased the parcel of land for what would become Lee Park in 1917 expressly to serve as the landscaped setting for the monument to the commander of the Confederate Army. Charlottesville’s First United Methodist Church flanks the park’s northeastern edge, lending Lee’s silhouette a Christian Colonial Revival backdrop.
Dedicated on May 21, 1924, the Lee monument was conceived by American sculptor Henry M. Shrady and completed by Italian artist Leo Lentelli after Shrady’s death. Like many of the Confederate monuments that dot the Southern landscape, Charlottesville’s Lee sculpture was forged in the North. Ironically, the New York-based Shrady also co-designed a monument to Lee’s wartime adversary, Union General Ulysses S. Grant, at the US Capitol in Washington, DC (Woodley, 2017). Charlottesville’s Lee monument depicts the general astride his beloved horse, Traveler, holding a hat in one hand and the horse’s reins in the other. Cast in bronze atop a pink granite base, the statue stands 26 feet tall with its pedestal.
The installation of Confederate monuments near legal and religious institutions was intentional. As evidenced by their strategic placement on the grounds of courthouses and opposite Christian places of worship, Confederate memorial statuary fused white supremacist ideology with church and state, legitimizing the former by association with the latter. In so doing, the monuments effectively sanctified their subjects, positioning Confederate leaders at once above the law and close to God.
For the Reverend Robert Wright Lee IV, a living descendant of General Robert E. Lee, Confederate monuments are false idols. In the South, he says, there is a sense that there is “God, Robert E. Lee, and Jesus; in that order. Like that’s the holy Trinity for the South, and that’s where it becomes idolatrous for me” (personal interview, July 2023). Reverend Lee has vigorously supported the movement to remove all Confederate symbols from public space, including statues of his ancestor. His advocacy comes from a deeply Christian perspective:
What I’ve tried to do in my work is separate this mythos, this mythological Lee, this Southern, gentile gentleman, from the Lee that beat his slaves so hard that they had to put it in the paper.
I think many white nationalists, around the time of August 2017, and well before then, had made an idol of white supremacy out of my ancestor. I need only look at scripture to look at what happens and should happen to idols.
The Hebrew Bible says that idols are what take us away from our perspective on God. And it’s obvious, through Christian nationalism and white nationalism today, that these viewpoints around the Lost Cause and Confederate General Lee are indeed taking us away from the perspective that could lead us toward wholeness, toward God and the divine—whatever you want to call it—but also national togetherness, which is something that God wanted for God’s people as far back as God goes. God wanted us to be in community with one another (ibid.).
Confederate idolatry was not the only kind of propaganda enshrined in the postbellum built environment. During the prolific period of Confederate monument dedication across the South following Reconstruction, city governments also erected a number of settler colonial monuments. In this study, settler colonialism refers to a form of colonization in which outsiders travel to land inhabited by Indigenous peoples and claim it as their own in perpetuity (Smith et al., 2019). Settler colonialism can more broadly be understood as an ongoing system of power that perpetuates the genocide, erasure, and repression of Indigenous peoples and cultures (Cox, 2017).
Settler colonial statuary depicts Native Americans in demeaning, racist caricature, illustrating their subordinate place in the US racial hierarchy. By trivializing the fact of Indigenous dispossession and genocide, settler colonial monuments valorize the ideology of Manifest Destiny and negate the violence through which it was enacted and economically sustained. This revisionist history is expressed in the visual language of the objects themselves, which often juxtapose revolutionary leaders—portrayed as intrepid explorers—against obsequiously posed Native people clothed in historically inaccurate dress.
It is no accident that Charlottesville’s George Rogers Clark (1921) and Their First View of the Pacific (1919)—both McIntire commissions—were also both dedicated during Jim Crow. Anti-Indigenous racism was rampant throughout the United States at that time and was likewise reflected in artworks. The George Rogers Clark monument, sculpted by Robert Ingersoll Aitken, depicts the Albemarle County-born Clark on horseback looming over three unarmed Native Americans, while three white frontiersmen crouch behind him, wielding rifles. Below the bronze figures, a pink granite pedestal bears the inscription: “GEORGE ROGERS CLARK/CONQUEROR OF THE NORTHWEST.” The “conqueror” epigraph ostensibly refers to Clark’s status as the highest-ranking Patriot military officer on the northwestern frontier during the American Revolutionary War. However, it should be understood today as a prime example of how settler colonial propaganda valorized the Native genocide and land theft that made westward expansion possible.
The monument, which stands 24 feet tall, had occupied Monument Square on the University of Virginia campus for exactly 100 years when UVA officials removed it on July 11, 2021. In 2022, a University spokesperson told C-ville.com that a committee co-chaired by a citizen of the Monacan nation and a UVA faculty member had been tasked to consult representatives of 13 Native American tribes about the statue’s future (C-ville, 2022). Regarding the small park that had once housed the monument, spokesperson Brian Coy said that “UVA plans to engage a landscape architect with Indigenous landscape expertise for a proposal for the park redesign” (VDHP, n.d.).
Like the George Rogers Clark monument, Their First View of the Pacific embodies the visual tropes of settler conquest and Indigenous oppression. Created by New York sculptor Charles Keck, the bronze-cast monument depicts three figures: two upright and a third crouching on the pair’s left side. The two upright figures portray Albemarle County resident Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, surveyors best known for leading the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-06) into the western territory newly acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. The crouching figure portrays Sacajawea, a Lemhi-Shoshone woman and an essential—albeit unpaid—member of the expedition, for which she served as a wilderness guide and interpreter. Sacajawea’s knowledge of the Yellowstone area and food sources available there played a critical role in the safe return of the group. She is famous for her bravery, which Clark recognized throughout his journal. Though she made the trip with her infant son strapped to her back, Sacajawea survived the capsizing of a boat during a squall, safeguarding herself and her son as well as the maps and materials ejected from the boat (Spector, 2021).
At a time when women, and particularly Native women, were widely regarded as fragile and helpless, Sacajawea proved to be a fearless navigator and resourceful naturalist among men who were renowned for such skills. Yet rather than being portrayed as such in Their First View of the Pacific, she is depicted crouching beside two white men standing tall. While some historians claim her pose conveys that she is engaged in tracking, others say she appears to be cowering.
Sacajawea’s great-great-great niece, Rose Ann Abrahamson, told the Idaho State Journal in 2021 that of the many images of her ancestor she has encountered, “This statue in Charlottesville was the worst we have ever seen” (Spector, 2021). Abrahamson characterized the monument as “inaccurate” and “outwardly offensive” because it cast her ancestor—whose courage and competence remain a point of pride for her descendants—as servile and subordinate to the intrepid Lewis and Clark. To counter the demeaning depiction, Abrahamson first suggested adding a plaque that would recontextualize Sacajawea’s accomplishments and explain her critical role in the expedition’s success. But she soon decided that would simply not suffice and launched an effort to remove the monument outright (ibid.).
Joining forces with her sister, Emma George, as well as her two daughters, Dustin and Willow Abrahamson, Rose Ann Abrahamson lobbied Charlottesville elected officials to support their cause. This effort, begun in 2009, culminated 10 years later with a panel discussion convened by the Charlottesville City Council. Appearing before the panel, the four women explained why the statue of their ancestor was both historically inaccurate—insofar as it diminished Sacajawea’s critical role in the Lewis and Clark Expedition—and offensive to Indigenous people writ large. Urging that the monument be removed and replaced, Rose Ann Abrahamson told the Council:
We believe that no statue today should cause a citizen to hang their head in shame or cause a child to question their worth. Let us for the sake of our children, our upcoming generation, show images of integrity, equity, and tolerance in our public forums (Spector, 2021).
It would take nearly two more years for Their First View of the Pacific to come down. During a special session on July 10, 2021, the Charlottesville City Council voted unanimously to remove it—along with the monuments to George Rogers Clark, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson—from the city’s built environment. UVA removed the George Rogers Clark monument the following day, whereas the other three monuments came down the day of the City Council vote.
Speaking to the removal of her ancestor’s likeness, which she described as a “catalyst,” Willow Abrahamson insisted, “This is not revisionist history; this is truth telling,” which would “hopefully create more restorative justice and return our humanity back to common decency and respect for one another as beings on this earth” (ibid.). The fate of the statue, which is currently being stored at the Lewis & Clark Exploratory Center in Charlottesville, remains undecided. City officials have promised to consult Sacajawea’s descendants regarding its disposition. One possibility is to erect a new, historically accurate monument, which Rose Ann Abrahamson said she would support, provided it portrays Sacajawea standing beside Lewis and Clark—“not crouching, not kneeling and not hiding” (ibid.).
The removal of four of Charlottesville’s monuments of oppression in July 2021 was preceded by the eviction of At Ready from the grounds of the Albemarle Circuit Court on September 12, 2020, following a unanimous vote by the Board of Supervisors a month prior. As a small crowd cheered, a crane lifted the statue of the anonymous Confederate soldier from its pedestal. A moving crew then loaded it onto a truck bound for the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation (Woods, 2020). “Johnny Reb’s” concrete plinth, which was dismantled and removed shortly thereafter, as well as the two cannons that once flanked him, would follow the statue to its new destination.
Yet one of Charlottesville’s six monuments of oppression remains in place. Centered in front of the neoclassical Rotunda on the UVA campus (a UNESCO World Heritage Site), a stately monument to Founding Father and UVA founder Thomas Jefferson towers over the paved brick plaza. The bronze statue is a smaller replica of the Jefferson monument in Louisville, Kentucky, created by Richmond-born sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel in 1899. The UVA monument, also created by Ezekiel in 1910, features a standing Jefferson perched atop a bronze pedestal shaped like the Liberty Bell. Equally spaced across the bell are four winged figures representing liberty, equality, justice, and religious freedom. The statue sits atop a marble base.
At the time of writing, the Jefferson monument at UVA bears no traces of its storied recent past. Just after sundown on September 12, 2017, Jefferson’s likeness was briefly shrouded in a black tarp. A few dozen graduate and undergraduate students encircled the marble plinth, arms linked, while three of them defiantly climbed atop. One protester held a cardboard sign scrawled with the words “TJ is a racist + rapist,” a reference to Jefferson’s long-standing coercive sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved Black woman whom he owned as property. Others clutched homemade signs that read “Protect Black bodies”; “Hate has no place here”; and “Black Lives Matter/F— White Supremacy.” A few students banged on a pair of makeshift bucket drums as the group chanted, “No Nazis, no KKK, no racist UVA!” (C-ville, 2017).
The students, about 100 in all, had gathered at the Rotunda on that rainy September evening in part to demand the removal of the monument to the UVA founder and third US President—a white man who owned upwards of 600 enslaved people in his lifetime, including Sally Hemings, the mother of six of his children. The students regarded the Jefferson monument as a symbol of white supremacy that blemished their campus—a view shared by many in the UVA community, including faculty (Woodley, 2017). Yet the students were also protesting what they viewed as the University’s paltry response to the catastrophic events that were set in motion at that exact spot one month earlier. The next section of this study will recount some scenes from what has come to be known as Charlottesville’s Summer of Hate, a two-day siege from which the city is still reeling. Six years later, many residents are still unable to talk about it. But some have.
Section 3: Summer of Hate
Around 9 p.m. on August 11, 2017, a few hundred activists descended upon the UVA campus, their faces illuminated by tiki torches. This was no candlelit vigil. The activists—mostly young, white men—had traveled from at least 35 states to assemble in Charlottesville ahead of what would mark the largest gathering of American white supremacists in a generation. Dressed in white polos and khakis, their preppy look belied their extremist views. Their presence in town was ostensibly for a sanctioned purpose: to protest the forthcoming eviction of the Robert E. Lee monument from the recently renamed Emancipation Park. Yet their flagship event—the Unite the Right rally, scheduled for the following day––was about far more than a single statue. As that tragic weekend made clear, it marked an inflection point in the 21st century resurgence of the white power movement in the United States.
The torchlight campus march foreshadowed the violence that would erupt downtown the next afternoon. As they snaked across the quad, white supremacists of various factions—alt-right; neo-Nazi; far-right militias; and the Ku Klux Klan—shouted hateful slogans like “Jews will not replace us!”; “White Lives Matter!”; and the Nazi “Blood and Soil!” Some gave the Nazi salute. When they reached the Rotunda, the marchers were met by a few dozen anti-racist activists, mostly UVA students, who had gathered to peacefully counter-protest the planned Unite the Right rally. The counter-protestors chanted “Black Lives Matter!” as they encircled the Jefferson monument with arms linked; a few held a large sign that read “UVA Students Act Against White Supremacy.”
Vastly outnumbered, the anti-racist counter-protestors were quickly surrounded by the white supremacist marchers. Within moments, there was mayhem. Chants of “White Lives Matter!” and racist taunts gave way to punches, kicks, and pepper spray as the marchers attacked, sending a few of the counter-protestors to the emergency room. Emily Gorcenski, one of the counter-protestors who filmed the melee, told ProPublica that she thought she was going to die as she was beaten over the head with a tiki torch. Nevertheless, she persisted, and captured a crucial record of that violent night.
Other than one university police officer, there was no sign of law enforcement during the unpermitted torchlight march. It took the Virginia State Police several minutes to arrive on scene and break up the brawl.
The next day, August 12, 2017, quickly spiraled out of control. While the Unite the Right rally was scheduled to begin at noon, Market Street Park (formerly Lee Park and briefly Emancipation Park) had already begun filling in by 8 a.m. Attendees arrived in groups and assembled in the area around the Lee monument, chanting Nazi slogans and carrying Valknut and Confederate flags. Many carried sticks, bats, and shields. Because Virginia is an open carry state, some were openly armed with pistols or shotguns.
The ralliers, who numbered in the hundreds, were met by just as many counter-protestors, who had also gathered early. Among the counter-protestors were local residents, clergy, civil rights leaders, and anti-fascist groups. While some anti-fascists yelled “Kill all Nazis!,” most counter-protestors voiced their opposition peacefully, chanting “No hate! No fear! White supremacists aren’t welcome here!” The contrast could not have been more stark between the interfaith coalition of clergy who linked arms and sang “This Little Light of Mine” and the neo-Nazis who roared back “Our blood! Our soil!”
A third contingent positioned itself between the two groups. Outfitted in full camouflage and armed with semi-automatic firearms, about three dozen members of a self-styled militia with right-wing ties showed up to “help keep the peace,” as their “commander” explained. Yet the threat of violence hung thick in the air. It became clear that an all-out brawl could be avoided only if police intervened.
They did not. Officers simply stood by and looked on as ralliers pilloried the counter-protestors with ad hoc weapons such as soda cans filled with urine or bleach. The counter-protestors who fought back—mostly men—used their bodies, sticks, or even street furniture, like newspaper boxes, to retaliate. Some ralliers threw tear gas bombs, inadvertently injuring some of their own. Full-on beatings occurred within a few feet of state and local law enforcement. Yet despite robust police presence along the perimeter of Market Street Park, patrolling officers declined to step in. Jackson Landers, a local filmmaker and journalist, described the scene in downtown Charlottesville on August 12:
[Police] stood there and did absolutely nothing, watching people being beaten and bloodied a foot away from them; people are begging for help and they’re not doing anything. A good friend of mine, a photographer, was punched in the face by a guy wearing an Adolf Hitler shirt, ten feet away from cops, saying “Come help me!” These police officers did nothing (personal interview, July 2023).
At 11:28 a.m. police finally declared the rally an unlawful assembly, informed the ralliers that Unite the Right would not move forward, and ordered the crowds to disperse. Within minutes the white nationalist groups scattered throughout the downtown streets, making their way toward their staging area at McIntire Park about a mile away. As Don Gathers, former Chair of Charlottesville’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces, put it in the documentary film Charlottesville: Our Streets:
The devil came to Charlottesville that day, and he brought the full fury of hell with him. Because from there, they began to march through our neighborhoods; they began to terrorize our local citizens. We basically were chasing them around town the remainder of the day (Wimer 2018).
As the white nationalist groups walked through town, they continued to exchange taunts and barbs with the counter-protestors. “Go the f— home!” a Black woman yelled at the passing group.
“Go the f— back to Africa!” one of them sneered back, as The Washington Post reports (Heim, 2017).
“Free Dylann Roof!” a group of ralliers chanted, referring to the white supremacist and domestic terrorist who assassinated nine African American parishioners at Mother Emmanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
As a counter-protestor pointed what appeared to be a lit flamethrower at a stream of white nationalists filing out of Market Street Park, one of them, clad in a bulletproof vest, withdrew a handgun from a leg holster and opened fire in the counter-protestor’s direction. Incredibly, the assailant missed his target and simply kept walking, blending back into the crowd.
At noon, then-Governor Terry McAuliffe declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard. Clad in full riot gear, National Guard troops joined local and state police in ushering the white nationalist groups out of the downtown area. By 1:15 p.m., clusters of counter-protestors had formed an impromptu parade, chanting and celebrating the cancellation of Unite the Right before it had (officially) begun. Local resident Jack Steinberg described the scene in Charlottesville: Our Streets: “It was a great big party. We were singing songs, and I must have hugged 50 people I’ve never met in my life. And it was one of those really, insanely human moments. And then of course we made that left-hand turn onto 4th Street” (Wimer, 2018).
That fateful left turn. At 1:42 p.m., a silver Dodge Challenger plowed into the parade on 4th and Water Streets, crashing into two idling cars and striking a number of counter-protestors. The car then throttled back up 4th toward Market Street, dragging more bodies along the way. The impact of both assaults sent people hurtling through the air and into the pavement. At least 35 people were injured, some seriously.
A small group of counter-protestors chased the car as it peeled off. Some sought shelter in nearby businesses; others rushed to render aid. At every corner of 4th and Water, bloodied bodies lay prone. As state police vehicles appeared on the scene, a Black man screamed, “This is why we did not want them here! Y’all let this sh– happen!”
Nineteen people were rushed to the hospital. For one of them, it was too late.
Katrina Taylor, a member of Black Lives Matter Charlottesville, spoke to the filmmakers of Charlottesville: Our Streets, her voice catching: “When we were in training,” she said, referring to civil disobedience training in advance of the rally, “people said that they wanted us behind them, because they would give their life for us. And that’s something Heather did do” (Wimer, 2018).
At 2:15 p.m., a 32-year-old white woman named Heather Danielle Heyer succumbed to her injuries. A local woman who worked as a paralegal and bartender, Heyer had not initially planned to attend the counter-protest, concluding after viewing footage of the Friday night torchlight march that it would be too dangerous. But she had a last-minute change of heart, texting a friend later Friday night that she felt “compelled to go, to show solidarity” (Sheehy, 2017).
A passionate advocate for social justice, Heyer had arrived downtown with two friends shortly before 1 p.m. As The Cut reports, she can be seen on a friend’s cell phone video calmly and sympathetically trying to connect with a helmeted female rallier, asking the woman why she chose to align herself with a hate group of violent white men. “She says she can’t comment,” Heyer called back to her friends (ibid.). Undeterred, she rejoined the crowd of counter-protestors on Water Street, chanting “Black Lives Matter!”
Rosia Parker, of Black Lives Matter Charlottesville, reflected on the community’s devastating loss in the Our Streets documentary:
It hurts me mentally; it hurts me emotionally and physically to know that somebody’s life was taken for this. I’m humbled, and I’m grateful because she did put her life on the line for us.
For the people that’s willing to put their lives on the line for us, as colored people, I thank them in advance. But I also thank them for that day. Because to them, Black Lives Matter (Wimer, 2018).
James Alex Fields, the neo-Nazi who committed the hate crime, was arrested within minutes and ultimately sentenced to two lifetime prison terms without parole plus 419 years.
Section 4: Counter-Monuments
During the early morning hours of November 9, 2017, the At Ready Confederate monument in front of the Albemarle County Courthouse was briefly swathed in a veil of vines. Later that morning, neo-Nazi Christopher Cantwell was set to attend a preliminary hearing on three felony charges stemming from his participation in Unite the Right. The stunt, timed to coincide with Cantwell’s hearing, marked the inaugural effort of the Kudzu Project, a guerrilla knitting activism project started in Charlottesville after the Summer of Hate. The group’s dozen or so members seek to critically question Confederate monuments throughout Virginia by cloaking every statue, one by one, in a shroud of knitted kudzu.
With each fleeting installation, anonymous members of the female-led knitting collective post photos of the shrouded monument to their website and to social media. The posts include information about the monument’s specific historical context as well as links to scholarly sources to encourage deeper engagement. The group’s members are especially interested in monuments sited outside of courthouses: “What sort of message does that send about the law?” they ask.
The Kudzu Project was inspired by “Defunct Monument I – Racism,” an illustration by Kansas-based artist Dave Loewenstein that depicts a monument completely enveloped by kudzu. Known as “the vine that ate the South,” kudzu is a non-native invasive plant species that was imported to the US from Japan in 1876. It grows rapidly and can climb up to 100 feet, smothering existing vegetation along roads and railways. Abandoned cars and buildings blanketed with kudzu are an iconic Southern visual trope, evoking a nostalgic American past.
There is a clear parallel between the romanticized past evoked by smothered relics and the Lost Cause myth of Confederate valor. Like kudzu-covered ruins, that revisionist mythos is, in a word, defunct, and belongs in the junkyard of history. By “yarnbombing” monuments of oppression with knitted vines, the Kudzu Project seeks not to hide the past, but rather to call attention to the artifice of Confederate propaganda.
The Kudzu Project can be understood as a wry take on craftivism—mostly simply defined as craft plus activism—which is “a very gentle form of protest,” says Sandra Markus, a professor of fashion design at the Fashion Institute of Technology (C-ville, 2018). Yet gentle doesn’t necessarily mean weak, Markus told C-ville.com. A political message rendered in “soft” materials like yarn, fabric, or thread is still a charged message. But when the form and materials used to convey its intent are familiar, nonthreatening, and feminized, it is received as a more palatable mode of dissent. Markus explains that for this reason she is “beginning to think that ultimately, [craftivism] might be a more powerful conduit for change than more violent ways of protest” (ibid.).
Some six years after the Kudzu Project shrouded its first statue, symbols of white supremacy have been defaced, toppled, or otherwise ejected from built environments across the United States. Scholars cite Charlottesville’s Summer of Hate as the second of three pivotal events that sparked this seismic social shift. Within six months of the first of these events—the Charleston church massacre of 2015—16 Confederate memorials across the country were relocated, removed, or renamed. Also in 2015, then-Governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley authorized the removal of the Confederate flag from the Charleston courthouse. In 2017, following the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, 37 Confederate monuments were removed nationwide. And in 2020, the police murder of George Floyd spurred the eviction of 157 Confederate memorials from public space—the most of any single year on record. 2020 was simply “the year the dam broke,” says Hamza Walker, The Brick director and curator of the forthcoming MONUMENTS exhibition (The Brick, n.d.).
Richmond’s Robert E. Lee monument featured vividly in the racial justice protests of June 2020. Like many other monuments of oppression in 2020, this statue was covered in multicolored, spray-painted messages like “Black Lives Matter” and “F— White Supremacy.” On June 8, activists projected an image of George Floyd’s face onto the 60-foot-tall plinth. Days later, on June 12, a giant rainbow pride flag appeared on the plinth, with “BLM” in white lettering on the equestrian sculpture itself. These images—of modern social mores superimposed over obsolete ones—are seared into the minds of many, including the Reverend Robert W. Lee IV. “I will never forget [those images] as long as I live,” he said, adding:
This stuff is what change is made of… That’s the essence of what we’re doing here. We’re taking things that once were acceptable and saying, “Hey, we really need to examine this.” But we’re also celebrating the things that we know in our hearts are good and right and just and need to be celebrated. And that, for me, that’s why I do [this work] (personal interview, July 2023).
Since “the year the dam broke,” Richmond’s Lee statue no longer towers over Monument Avenue. In downtown Charlottesville, weedy, vacant mounds mark a sense of absence. Preschools at Congregation Beth Israel and First United Methodist no longer take their charges to play in nearby Market Street Park, which, until the autumn of 2023, had hosted an encampment of unhoused people. Now, litter peppers the park’s expanse.
There is a sense in the community that since the Summer of Hate, Market Street Park has been lost to vagrancy and petty crime. Some locals believe that this is intentional. While some degree of illicit activity had plagued the park prior to Unite the Right, things declined after the event. The Charlottesville Police Department—widely criticized for failing to mitigate the violence of August 12, 2017—has since seemingly adopted a policy of deliberate indifference. Rather than respond affirmatively to the community’s understandable anger, local police have instead opted to neglect the areas they are charged to patrol.
As the parks and plazas that once housed the city’s “false idols” sit vacant for now, ephemeral monuments have cropped up elsewhere. On a stretch of 4th Street between Main and Water—officially renamed Honorary Heather Heyer Way—an improvised memorial honors the slain woman. The memorial began on the evening of August 12, 2017, with a candlelit vigil in the center of the Main Street pedestrian mall. Three heartbroken people sat silently around a single candle with their heads in their hands. Throughout the night, a few others came by with flowers. In the days that followed, more flowers and candles appeared.
After the crime scene tape was removed from 4th Street, city officials moved the offerings down to the stretch where Heyer was killed. According to locals, the informal memorial grew day after day, ultimately stretching across all of 4th street. Well-wishers paid tribute with all kinds of things: books; teddy bears; handwritten notes; homemade CDs; and countless bouquets of flowers––fresh and faux. After some weeks, the city government reopened the street to traffic and moved the offerings to the sidewalk.
Today, the old brick buildings on either side of Honorary Heather Heyer Way bear chalked messages of commemoration (“Gone but not forgotten”), racial justice (“Black Lives Matter”), and hope (“Hope is love + action”). But there are also pleas for vigilance (“It can happen again”). One poignantly quotes Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, who proclaimed at her daughter’s memorial, speaking to the hate groups behind Unite the Right: “You just magnified her” (MacBlane and O’Neil, 2022).
Whenever it rains, the chalked graffiti messages are maintained, tended by locals intent on preserving Heyer’s legacy. Street signs on that stretch are bound with purple ribbons––Heyer’s favorite color––with plastic and felted flowers woven through. Collectively, these tokens of tribute have become, in a way, a kind of counter-monument: a living memorial of a social movement magnified.
Yet not all Charlottesvillers see them that way. Beyond some practical issues, like glass vessels that end up smashed on the sidewalk, Heather Heyer Way remains freighted with trauma. Six years on, the owner of a record shop there simply can’t talk about the day a young woman died on his doorstep. For Jackson Landers, traversing that stretch of 4th Street is still difficult:
As someone who has to walk past that almost every day, and as someone who was in the middle of that riot—I got tear gassed or pepper sprayed five times that day and saw unbelievable violence; I’ve also been to many of these other events on assignment as a journalist—I’m tired of having to be reminded and retraumatized every time I walk by. I would like to have a day where I don’t think about that anymore (personal interview, July 2023).
While Landers would like to see the public mourning period come to an end, he is in favor of installing a commemorative plaque on 4th Street and supports its honorary renaming.
Just a few blocks away, another sort of counter-monument occupies the area in front of Number Nothing Court Square, a nondescript brick building that once functioned as a local mercantile. A piece of paper taped to a black lamppost out front reads, in all caps, “IN MEMORY OF THOSE WHO WERE BOUGHT AND SOLD HERE.” Below that, a sticker with the numbers “1619” clings to the base of the post, referencing the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia. Where the brick-paved sidewalk meets the street, faded white lettering spells out “Human Trafficking Site,” and on the sidewalk a few fresh flower pots flank a weather-worn paper sign somehow adhered to the brick surface (O’Hare, 2021).
The sign, authored by the Charlottesville Historic Resources Committee, explains that the site, a former auction block, was one of a handful around Court Square where enslaved human beings were bought and sold during the antebellum era. The bronze plaque that once conveyed that message has been missing since February 2020, when it was pried out of the ground and flung into the James River by local resident Richard Allen. An amateur historian and activist, Allen says he was finally compelled to expropriate the plaque after fuming about it for several years. “It is the height of insult to place the history of Charlottesville enslavement on the ground where people with dirt on their shoes can stand upon it,” Allen, a then-74-year-old white man, told C-Ville (2020).
The offending plaque, a small bronze slab, simply read “Slave Auction Block/On this site slaves were bought and sold.” Passersby used to edit its text to read “HUMAN Auction Block/On this site PEOPLE were bought and sold,” using either chalk or marker on scraps of cardboard. Ever since Allen absconded with the original, DIY plaques have appeared in its place, recontextualizing the site’s significance. One of the most common ones features a printed image of the edited version. When the paper signs inevitably wash away with a bout of rain, someone always replaces them (C-ville, 2020).
The Charlottesville Historic Resources Committee has announced plans for developing a framework for a formal commemoration of human trafficking in Charlottesville, guided by local descendants of enslaved people. For now, community-driven counter-monuments continue to take up the mantle.
Section 5: Swords into Plowshares
The question of what ought to be done with Confederate memorials and other monuments of oppression is a fraught one, mired in many cases by protracted legal battles. But on October 21, 2023, one community’s vision finally began to materialize. On that Saturday morning, a handful of local activists and press photographers gathered in a small Charlottesville foundry to witness the immolation of an idol. They watched as a metalworker, clad in full-body protective gear, trained his plasma torch on the bronze face of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. As layers of patina melted away, the hollow head fluoresced shades of aqua and violet, oozing molten metal onto the concrete floor.
It took most of the morning to slice the statue into nine pieces small enough to fit into the foundry’s 2,250-degree furnace. When the metalworker finally turned off his torch and tapped the head with a mallet, Lee’s face slid right off, clanging into the floor. “It feels like witnessing a public execution,” Dr. Andrea Douglas told The New York Times (Thompson, 2023).
While the event was closed to the public due to safety concerns, Dr. Douglas, as Executive Director of Charlottesville’s Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, had business being there. Dr. Douglas, together with UVA Professor of Religion Dr. Jalane Schmidt, co-founded in 2021 the Swords Into Plowshares project: a community-led effort to melt down the Lee monument and repurpose the metal for a new public artwork. In their own words:
Swords Into Plowshares is our vision for transforming Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue into a new commissioned work of public art. In naming the initiative, we have drawn inspiration from the prophetic vision of Isaiah 2:4, which celebrates turning tools of violence into ones of peace and community-building. This project is already shaping the national conversation around toppled Confederate statues by modeling a community-engaged process of creative transformation—one that turns historic trauma into an artistic expression of democratic values and inclusive aspirations (SIP, n.d.).
Lee’s fate at the furnace was set in motion in 2016, when local Black Lives Matter activist Zyahna Bryant started a petition to evict him from downtown Charlottesville. In the petition, Bryant, aged 15 at the time, called on the City Council to remove the monument and rename Lee Park. “As a teenager in Charlottesville that identifies as black,” she wrote, “I am offended every time I pass it. I am reminded over and over again of the pain of my ancestors” (Bryant, 2016).
A year later, the young activist got her wish. In February 2017, the Charlottesville City Council voted to remove the Lee monument from the urban built environment and rename Lee Park. But Bryant’s victory was tempered by a lawsuit quickly filed by a coalition of neo-Confederate groups bent on keeping the statue in place. Six months later, the conflict would culminate in the Summer of Hate.
Yet anti-racist activists ultimately prevailed. Following the July 2021 removal of the Lee monument, among others, the City Council began soliciting proposals for its afterlife. They received dozens of submissions, including numerous requests to display the statue on private property. The New York Times reports that a Texas man wrote that because “the city has no honor,” he would happily relocate the monument to a place where it could “be viewed by all patriots who wish to keep our heritage strong” (Thompson, 2023).
The City was unmoved. Instead of consigning Lee to a private residence, the City Council awarded him in December 2021 to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, which spearheads the Swords Into Plowshares project (JSAAHC, 2021).
Given how often the Lee monument and its pernicious ideals were ritualized with flames—from Klansmens’ torches in 1924 to tiki torches in 2017—the furnace seems a fitting end. But the kindling of Lee’s likeness also marks the beginning of its afterlife. The next phase of Swords Into Plowshares will solicit artistic proposals for the bronze ingots and impanel a jury to select a finalist sometime in 2024. The steering committee hopes to have the new artwork completed and installed by 2027, which will mark the 10th anniversary of Charlottesville’s Summer of Hate.
Swords Into Plowshares is already inspiring other community-led efforts across the US to repurpose monuments of oppression and reimagine them for specific local contexts. Reverend Robert W. Lee IV expresses enthusiastic support, exclaiming, “If a community wants to melt it down, I’ll be there. I’ll bring marshmallows!” (personal interview, July 2023).
References
Bryant, Z. (2016). Petition: Change the name of Lee Park and Remove the Statue. Change.org. https://chng.it/5FMSjmWXq8.
Charlottesville-Albemarle Collaborative Encyclopedia (Cvillepedia). (n.d.). Stonewall Jackson Statue. Retrieved July 2023, from https://www.cvillepedia.org/Stonewall_Jackson_Statue.
Correcting the Narrative. (2020, June 19). At The Ready: The Albemarle County Courthouse Confederate Memorial. http://correctingthenarrative.org/posts/acc-conf-soldier-statue/.
Cox, A. (2017, July 26). Settler Colonialism. In Oxford Bibliographies. https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780190221911/obo-9780190221911-0029.xml.
Cox, K. (2003). Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. University of Florida Press.
C-ville. (2017, September 14). Tarped: Students shroud Jefferson statue in black at Rotunda. http://c-ville.com/tarped-students-shroud-jefferson-statue-black-rotunda/.
C-ville. (2018, January 17). Locals Craft their own brand of activism. http://c-ville.com/locals-craft-brand-activism/.
C-ville. (2020, February 7). ‘Why I did it:’ County resident confesses to taking slave auction block. http://c-ville.com/why-i-did-it-county-resident-confesses-to-taking-slave-auction-block/.
C-ville. (2022, April 27). Checking in. http://c-ville.com/checking-in/.
Equal Justice Initiative (EJI). (2020). Reconstruction in America: Racial Violence after the Civil War, 1865-1876. https://eji.org/report/reconstruction-in-america/a-truth-that-needs-telling/.
Heim, J. (2017, August 14). Recounting a day of rage, hate, violence and death: How a rally of white nationalists and supremacists at the University of Virginia turned into a “tragic, tragic weekend.” The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/local/charlottesville-timeline/.
Higgins, J. (2020, September 15). ‘Johnny Reb’ is gone – Here’s the status of the 5 other Charlottesville-area statues activists want removed. Charlottesville Tomorrow. https://www.cvilletomorrow.org/johnny-reb-is-gone-heres-the-status-of-the-5-other-charlottesville-area-statues-activists-want-removed/.
Holloway, K. (2018, November 2). Time to Expose the Women Still Celebrating the Confederacy. The Daily Beast. https://www.thedailybeast.com/time-to-expose-the-women-still-celebrating-the-confederacy/.
Ivy Creek Natural Area & Historic River View Farm. (n.d.). The Monacan Indians – A Local History. Retrieved July 2023, from https://ivycreekfoundation.org/docs/6.Monacans_.pdf.
Janney, C. (2020, January 7). Ladies’ Memorial Associations. In Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/ladies-memorial-associations/#:~:text=Ladies%27%20Memorial%20Associations%20were%20locally,reinterred%20them%20in%20Confederate%20cemeteries..
Jefferson School African American Heritage Center (JSAAHC). (2021, October 8). Plan to melt Charlottesville Confederate statue submitted by Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. https://www.cvilletomorrow.org/plan-to-melt-charlottesville-confederate-statue-submitted-by-jefferson-school-african-american-heritage-center/.
Kudzu Project, The. (n.d.). The Kudzu Project. Retrieved July 2023, from https://www.thekudzuproject.org/.
Little, B. (2017, August 17). How the US Got So Many Confederate Monuments. The History Channel. https://www.history.com/articles/how-the-u-s-got-so-many-confederate-monuments.
MacBlane, A. and O’Neil, L. (2022, August 18). Photo Series: Heather Heyer Memorial Way. The Cavalier Daily. https://www.cavalierdaily.com/article/2022/08/photo-series-heather-heyer-memorial-way.
Monacan Indian Nation. (n.d.). Our History. Retrieved July 2023, from https://www.monacannation.gov/our-history.html.
National Galleries Scotland. (n.d.). Contrapposto. Retrieved July 2023, from https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/glossary-terms/contrapposto.
O’Hare, E. (2021, September 21). What will happen to Charlottesville’s auction block site on which humans were bought and sold? That building is now for sale. Charlottesville Tomorrow. https://www.cvilletomorrow.org/this-historic-building-now-for-sale-in-court-square-was-once-the-site-of-charlottesvilles-slave-auction-block-the-listing-does-not-include-that-fact/.
Schmidt, J. (2019, August 12). Charlottesville’s Courthouse Confederate Soldier Statue. Medium. https://medium.com/@JalaneSchmidt/what-you-need-to-know-about-charlottesvilles-courthouse-confederate-soldier-f6f5e2cee5d4.
Sheehy, G. (2017, August 31). What Heather Heyer Knew. The Cut. https://www.thecut.com/2017/08/what-heather-heyer-knew.html.
Sincuba, T. H. (2022, February 11). Contrapposto – What is Contrapposto, the Famous Classical Pose? https://artincontext.org/contrapposto/.
Smith, L., Yang, K., & Tuck, E. (2019). Indigenous and decolonizing studies in education: mapping the long view. Routledge.
Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). (2022). Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy (Third edition). https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy-third-edition/#methodology.
Spector, C. (2021, August 6). Shoshone-Bannock woman instrumental in removal of Sacajawea statue in Virginia. Idaho State Journal. https://www.idahostatejournal.com/news/local/shoshone-bannock-woman-instrumental-in-removal-of-sacajawea-statue-in-virginia/article_8e49c630-85cd-56b5-b300-098597b9cad3.html.
Stone, C. (1904). U.D.C. Catechism for Children. In Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/primary-documents/u-d-c-catechism-for-children-1904/.
Swords into Plowshares (SIP). (n.d.). What is Swords into Plowshares? Retrieved July 2023, from https://www.sipcville.com/about.
The Brick (n.d.). Monuments. Retrieved July 2023, from https://the-brick.org/monuments.
Thompson, E. (2023, October 27). The Most Controversial Statue in America Surrenders to the Furnace. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/27/opinion/robert-e-lee-confederate-statues.html.
University of Virginia (UVA) Law Library. (n.d.). Charlottesville Statues: Legal History Research Guide. Retrieved July 2023, from https://statues.law.virginia.edu/ .
Virginia Department of Historic Resources (VDHP). (n.d.). “Their First View of The Pacific” (Meriwether Lewis and William Clark Sculpture). Retrieved July 2023, from https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/104-0273/#:~:text=Entitled%20%E2%80%9CTheir%20First%20View%20of,is%20their%20Indian%20guide%20Sacagawea.
Wimer, B (Director). (2018). Charlottesville: Our Streets [Film].
Woodley, J. (2017, August 15). Charlottesville, Virginia: the history of the statue at the centre of violent unrest. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/charlottesville-virginia-the-history-of-the-statue-at-the-centre-of-violent-unrest-82476.
Woods, C. R. (2020, June 22). City Council waiting for judge to alter injunction to go ahead with process to remove Confederate monuments. Charlottesville Tomorrow. https://www.cvilletomorrow.org/city-council-waiting-for-judge-to-alter-injunction-to-go-ahead-with-process-to-remove-confederate-monuments/.
York University. (n.d.). Colonialism, Coloniality and Settler Colonialism. Retrieved July 2023, from https://www.yorku.ca/edu/unleading/systems-of-oppression/coloniality-and-settler-colonialism/.
