Those horrified by the removal of Lee’s statue might want to take a look at the role of Confederate Heritage Defenders in promoting the current ire directed at the statue.
For years the people of Richmond have been trying to move the statue but found themselves blocked in deciding what parts of Virginia history were memorialized in their city by a state legislature of representatives with no connection to Richmond who insisted that Lee and his accomplices rule over the city’s monumental landscape.
While some are decrying the removal of the statue as an assault on great art, we need only to watch video of pre-2020 attempts to remove the statue to see that it was not artists, art students, or art historians who encircled the statue in its defense, it was NeoConfederates from often racist and extremist organizations carrying Confederate flags who mobilized from out of town, I spent time on their social media which often characterized Richmond as “enemy territory.” Groups like the Virginia Flaggers went out of their way to insult those who actually live in Richmond and they indelibly associated the Lee statue with the worst tendencies in American political life.
There is a reason many Richmonders assembled happily yesterday to watch the statue come down. It had become a gathering place for those opposed to the changes in race relations over the last sixty years. It was a shrine at which white supremacists came to worship. The fact that so many “ordinary white Southerners” accepted this transformation of the statue into an altar for NeoConfederate worship illustrated the danger inherent in its continued presence in the city. For Richmonders, removing the statue meant removing the gathering place it had become for militiamen, MAGAs, and denizens of the AltRight.
When I saw supporters of the statue loudly proclaim that they would “never visit Richmond again” I thought to myself, “yeah, I think that is one of the goals of the statue’s removal.”
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That is a very astute opinion piece. It’s easy to forget that the South is diverse, that Richmond is not far from Washington, demographically as well as geographically, and that those who revere the Confederacy are a vocal minority.
Thanks.
The rambling hysterics of the eternal Yankee never ends. Perhaps it is all projection due to their region being the most racially segregated nowadays.
I am not a Yankee. I am a Met.