Robert E. Lee Statue At Center Of 'Unite The Right' Rally Melted Down, Leading To Final Jokes At Confederate General's Expense
The Charlottesville Robert E. Lee statue, the center of 2017's Confederate statue removal controversy and the deadly Unite the Right Rally, has been melted down and its materials will be repurposed into a new piece of public art.
A video shared by the Washington Post showing Lee's bronze face glowing red in 2,500-degree heat has gone viral on social media.
The melting of the statue was led by Charlottesville's Black History Museum, which staved off a protracted legal battle from the statue's defenders to preserve it or have it repurposed into Civil War replica cannons.
The repurposing of the material will be undertaken by a group called Swords Into Plowshares, which takes its name from a Biblical passage in which the prophet Isaiah sees "turning tools of violence into ones of peace and community-building."
The news was seen as a victory for left-leaning posters online. While some hail Lee as a brilliant general and a key figure in Southern American history, he led the Confederate army after the South seceded from the Union, due in large part to the South's desire to maintain slavery. For this reason, Lee's critics have painted him as a traitor, and they fired off jokes at his expense as the clip made the rounds.
Others relitigated arguments from the statue removal controversy of 2017, arguing that the Lee statue was a part of history, and its removal and eventual destruction were actions denying that history.
Many phrased their displeasure with the statue in ominous, conspiratorial terms, among other sentiments.
While social media hashed out the significance of the statue's destruction, some had more prescient priorities and noted the smoldering face of Lee's statue would make for a great Halloween costume.
Share Pin
Val Mid
Don’t like General Lee for various reasons but it is pretty ignorant to take down/destroy this statue since it was made by Leo Lentelli (an Italian immigrant), Henry Shrady (creator of General Grant Memorial), and Paul Goodloe McIntire (a recipient of the French Legion of Honor in 1929 for his founding of a children's tuberculosis hospital in France for refugees from the German-occupied north).
If anything, replace the statue with based Christian John Brown, or General Sherman on it!
Nurdboy42
SirSomeguy
Just gonna say that Robert E. Lee himself opposed making monuments to the Confederacy:
BudgieArchiver
I don't care about Robert E Lee, but I do think it's horrible to destroy historical artwork of any sort, as it's erasing history.
SwipeWire
Yeah…just move it somewhere.
Roth
Like a museum. It should go in a museum, same with the other controversial memorials.
Gumshoe
I strongly disagree with the idea that this is "erasing history", which is a very common defense of these statues. People don't learn history through the medium of statues and never will. Statues exist to venerate and honor people, not to give any information about them or their lives. We don't just keep statues around of every important historical figure for that reason. We know plenty about Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Sadam Hussein etc. without needing to build statues of them.
This particular statue was not even built any time close to the Civil War. It went up over 50 years after Lee died, in a period often called "The Nadir of American Race Relations", where KKK activit and anti-black discrimination policies were back on the rise after Reconstruction. The time when it was put up saw numerous Confederate statues put up as part of a campaign to intimidate local black people and itself erase the horrific history of the Antebellum South.
view the rest of this conversation →