Florida will replace Confederate statue in US Capitol with one of African-American woman

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) signed a bill Tuesday ordering that a statue of a Confederate general at the U.S. Capitol be removed and replaced with one of an African-American woman.

The statue of Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith will be removed from Statuary Hall and replaced with a monument to Mary McLeod Bethune, The Associated Press reported Tuesday.

{mosads}Bethune founded the institution that would go on to become Bethune-Cookman University, a historically black university in Daytona Beach, Fla.

The statue will also be the first monument of an African-American woman in Statuary Hall, according to the AP.

The new statue comes after a national debate surrounding Confederate monuments in the wake of the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., last year. White supremacists had gathered to protest the removal of a monument of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Democratic lawmakers demanded that Confederate statues be removed from the U.S. Capitol after the rally and introduced legislation to do so.

Cities and towns across the country have since removed Confederate statues, including Baltimore, which earlier this month rededicated the former site of four of the monuments to abolitionist Harriet Tubman.