After years of legal battles, the Swords into Plowshare project has melted down the statue of Robert E. Lee, which once stood in a park near Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall. Opposition to the monument’s initial removal fueled the deadly violence of the 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally. Now, the bronze which once formed the […]
After years of legal battles, the Swords into Plowshare project has melted down the statue of Robert E. Lee, which once stood in a park near Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall. Opposition to the monument’s initial removal fueled the deadly violence of the 2017 white supremacist Unite the Right rally. Now, the bronze which once formed the […]
Community members gathered at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center on October 30 to hear the latest on the Swords Into Plowshares project, which seeks to melt down Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue and repurpose its bronze into a new public artwork. In December, the Trevilian Station Battlefield Foundation and the Ratcliffe Foundation filed […]
For nearly a century, Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue—erected during the Jim Crow era, in the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan—towered above the park at the city’s center, signaling to Black residents that they were not wanted downtown. After years of court battles and a deadly white supremacist rally, the city removed the racist […]