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As the crowd rejoiced, a statue of General Robert Lee, Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Civil War Confederate Army, was dismantled in downtown Charlottesville, followed by a statue of another nearby Confederate General Stonewood Jackson (pictured).
The municipality’s plans to remove the Lee statue provoked white nationalist protests in August 2017. There were clashes between the protesters and the counter-demonstrators, and a young man deliberately hit the counter-demonstrators in a car, killing a 32-year-old woman.
Opponents of the dismantling of the statues sued Charlottesville Municipal Court, citing a Virginia state law that protects war memorials.
The municipality, for its part, argued that the law violated the U.S. constitution because the statues contained a racist message.
The trial lasted several years.
Lee and Jackson statues will be kept until the municipality decides what to do with them.
More than 500,000 people went to the U.S. Civil War from 1861 to 1865, fighting North and South for state rights and slavery.
The southern states sought independence from the United States, claiming that the tariffs applied by the government were detrimental to the southern economy, and formed its own Confederation, which maintained slavery, which was abolished in the northern states.
After the loss of the Confederates in the Civil War, slavery was also abolished in the southern states.
In recent years, confederate statues have been removed in many parts of the United States.
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