Story at a glance
- Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam has called for the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Richmond.
- A judge has temporarily stopped the order from being executed.
- A descendant of the former Confederate general says he supports the removal of the statue.
The Robert E. Lee Monument was the first monument unveiled on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, paying homage to the confederate general who had died two decades earlier in 1870. After over a century, its future is now in question as a federal judge granted a temporary injunction against Gov. Ralph Northam’s order to remove the statue.
“That statue has been there for a long time. It was wrong then, and it’s wrong now. So we’re taking it down,” Northam said during a press conference announcing the removal of the statue.
Next to him stood Robert W. Lee IV, pastor of Unifour Church and descendent of Lee himself.
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The sixty-foot-tall monument is a reminder of the city and the state’s fight in defense of slavery during the Civil War. But some prefer an alternate view of history, one that idolizes Lee as a hero and the Confederate cause as a just one.
Lee IV confessed that he too once subscribed to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy in an op-ed for The Washington Post titled, “Robert E. Lee is my ancestor. Take down his statue, and let his cause be lost.”
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“I am fully aware that the broken, racist system we have built on the Lost Cause is far larger than a single statue, but the statue of my ancestor has stood for years in Richmond as an idol of this white supremacist mind-set. The statue is a hollow reminder of a painful ideology and acts of oppression against black people. Taking it down will provide new opportunities for conversations, relationships and policy change,” he wrote in The Washington Post.
Lee acknowledged the concerns of his “fellow Southerners” of the loss of Lee’s legacy and Southern heritage, but suggests they are born out of a fear of change.
“Others of us have worked for generations to escape the scorn my family — and the Lost Cause mythology — has brought upon the nation. And for many of us, removing the statue of Lee was a culmination of years of work. For me, this symbolic gesture stands at the start of a new way of life in the South, a new cause that could replace the Lost Cause mentality if we get this right,” he wrote.
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