Oct 26, 2023 at 11:48 PM Update: 28 minutes ago
A large bronze statue of North American General Robert E. Lee has been secretly melted down. The statue was located in Charlottesville in the United States and played a role in protests that left one person dead and 35 injured in 2017.
On August 12, 2017, right-wing activists gathered around the almost century-old statue.
They wanted to express their dissatisfaction with the plan to remove the statue of the American Civil War general. Counter-protesters stood a little further away. An extreme right-wing man drove his car into them.
Despite the disagreements, the 2,700-pound statue was removed from its pedestal in July 2021 and ultimately transferred to the Museum of Black History in Charlottesville.
Foundries were afraid to melt down the statue
The museum wanted to have it melted down, but it took a while before that worked. For example, foundries they approached for the job were afraid of violent reactions.
Eventually they found a foundry “somewhere in the southern US” that would do it. The Washington Post was allowed to attend on the condition that the location and even the state where the foundry is located would remain secret.
The melting down was an initiative of museum director Andrea Douglas and religious scholar Jalane Schmidt. Schmidt calls the meltdown a “moral hazard” in the newspaper. “Hoping to create something new.”
According to Schmidt, it feels like a kind of execution: “as if there is a mad dog walking in the neighborhood that has hurt people and needs to be injected.”
General Lee is controversial because he played an important role in the battles of the southern states for the right to keep enslaved people.
Image: The removal of the statue by Robert E Leein 2021, Getty Images
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United StatesCharlottesvilleSlaveryDiscrimination and racismForeign
2023-10-26 21:48:58
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