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As the esteemed R&B crooner Usher once said, “Gotta let it burn.”
Check out the video below, featuring incredible footage of metalworkers melting down a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. I shed no tears over it, but it appears Lee did.
As The Washington Post caption describes, efforts to remove the statue are what prompted the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, where far-right extremists in Charlottesville, Virginia, incited a riot rooted in their opposition to the removal plans. And those removal plans stemmed from activists who’ve made inroads over the last decade in removing statues that lionize Confederate officials and other figures linked to slavery.
The statue was officially removed in 2021, but don’t let the video fool you: It’s still going to be put to use. The city has given it to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, Charlottesville’s Black history museum. The museum’s executive director, Andrea Douglas, and Jalane Schmidt, who directs the Memory Project at the University of Virginia’s Karsh Institute of Democracy, are leading the initiative that will turn the metal into new art.
As the Post explained:
Swords Into Plowshares, a project led by the two women, will turn bronze ingots made from molten Lee into a new piece of public artwork to be displayed in Charlottesville. They made arrangements for Lee to be melted down while they started collecting ideas from city residents for that new sculpture.
Predictably, conservatives are… well… melting down over molten Lee.
“They absolutely want your extinction,” Elon Musk, owner of social media platform X, wrote in response to a self-proclaimed Lee descendant and X user who complained about the statue’s demise.
And there were more right-wing tears where that came from.
Swords Into Plowshares has begun collecting ideas from city residents on what the new art could be. I’m hoping they place their full backing behind a statue of Virginia legend Missy Elliott. Or, perhaps, another obvious answer: one Allen Iverson.
I’m fascinated by the idea of repurposing Confederate statues — which I deem to be oppressive art — into something else. In this era of book bans and curriculum censorship, some well-intentioned historians have expressed wariness that removing statues amounts to similar erasure. I disagree with them. But repurposing a statue ought to quell those concerns. It doesn’t curb historical memory — it builds on it. We’ll never forget the hunk of metal that once was Charlottesville’s monument to Robert E. Lee. We’ll always be reminded of it when we see the new art it gave way to. And I view that as a righteous affirmation that history is not written by conquerors, after all.
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