Last Updated on October 27, 2023
A black history museum has melted down the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that once stood in Charlottesville, Virginia, and will now turn it into a new piece of “public art” to advance a left-wing race narrative. National File originally reported on plans to melt down the statue, which was quietly transferred to the museum by city officials after its removal, in 2021.
Charlottesville, Virginia’s former statue of General Robert E. Lee, which was torn down in 2021 after a lengthy court battle spurred on by the city’s left-wing, pro-BLM government, was melted down by the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center at a location described by the media simply as a “southern foundry.”
According to The Washington Post and photographs that have emerged of the statue’s destruction, the sculpture of General Lee and his war horse, Traveller, was cut into pieces before being melted down in a more than 2,000-degree furnace.
Fox News described the melting down of the Lee statue as being done in a “secret” and “symbolic ceremony”.
The destruction of Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue and others like it have drawn comparisons to Soviet conquest and humiliation rituals and represent a far cry from the moves to battlefields that proponents of statue and monument removal claimed would come from their demise.
As National File reported in December of 2021:
Charlottesville, Virginia’s famous statue of American General Robert E. Lee will be given to a black history museum where its bronze will be melted down and turned into modern art to help form the city’s new left-wing race narrative. The statue’s fate comes after a middle-of-the-night vote by the Charlottesville City Council, which rejected offers from groups that wanted to preserve it.
The Charlottesville Lee statue will be given to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, a black history museum that will melt it down as part of their “swords into plowshares” project. The museum’s executive director, Andrea Douglas, says they’ll then repurpose the statue into art that will “allow Charlottesville to contend with its racist past.”
In a bizarre move that resembles Soviet efforts to rewrite the history of conquered nations or remove their enemies from old photographs, the museum will give the “repurposed” bronze of the statue back to the City of Charlottesville when their project is complete, for it to be re-erected on city property.
After lengthy legal battles, the Lee statue was removed by the City of Charlottesville in the summer of 2021, alongside a statue to Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, as well as one depicting the famed explorers of the American West, George Lewis and Meriwether Clark. The statue of Lewis and Clark also featured their Shoshone Indian guide, Sacagawea, who was erased from the city’s history alongside them.
The city council has not yet unveiled its plans for the statues aside from Lee, though members of the council have indicated that their destruction and transformation to left-wing art is not off the table, especially for the statue of Stonewall Jackson.
While Democrat politicians, activists, and others who supported removing America’s historic monuments often promised that they’d be moved to museums or battlefields and viewed in their “full context,” that seldom seems to be the case.
In addition to the destruction of Charlottesville’s Lee statue, monuments that were ripped down by the Northam Administration in Richmond appear to have uncertain fates and are currently sitting in warehouses despite numerous offers to rescue them, oftentimes at no expense to the state.
In the case of Charlottesville, The Statutory Park at Gettysburg Battlefield offered to take the Lee and Jackson monuments from the city to be displayed alongside other Civil War relics, but the city declined their offer, opting to melt down Lee for his bronze instead.
Critics of the city council and Jefferson School have pointed out that the black history museum is effectively “looting” the Lee Statue of its bronze, much like when the Northam Administration tried and failed to loot the Richmond Lee Monument of a 19th century time capsule.
After tearing down Lee in Richmond, Northam ordered the capsule, buried somewhere in the monument’s base, dug up and replaced with a new one stuffed full of Black Lives Matter paraphernalia. In what many have called “Lee’s Final Victory,” Northam’s crews were unable to find the time capsule and get to the Civil War artifacts hidden inside.
