Wednesday, December 23rd, 2020
Robert E. Lee Statue Removed from U.S. Capitol
A statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee that stood in the U.S. Capitol for 111 years has been removed, Virginia Governor Bobby Tyler announced.
The statue, which stood alongside another Virginian, president George Washington, was part of the state's contribution to the National Statuary Hall. Each state is allowed two statues in the collection. The statute of Washington will be joined by a statue of civil rights icon Barbara Johns instead of Lee.
"We should all be proud of this step forward for our great Commonwealth of Virginia," Tyler said in a statement. "The Confederacy is a symbol of our state's troubled and shameful history, and a reminder of our past failures to live up to the promises of the American dream. It is now time to begin telling a new story of Virginia, a story about perseverance and inclusion, and loyalty to the foundational ideas of our country."
Tyler, the state's first African-American governor, acquiesced to a bipartisan commission's unanimous recommendation to remove the statue. Lee became the leading Confederate general in the Civil War, after resigning his U.S. Army commission after his state seceded in 1861. According to historian John Ambrose of the University of Virginia, Lee "became synonymous with the Confederacy" and served as an icon of the south's Confederate heritage.
In contrast, Johns represents, in the words of state delegate Leon Farfield (D), "the proud tradition of Virginians fighting for justice". In 1951, the 16 year-old Johns led a strike in protest of the unequal, racially-segregated schools in her hometown of Farmville. The case was picked up by the NAACP and consolidated with four other cases in the landmark 1954 case of
Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down racial segregation of schools and is sometimes marked as the beginning of the civil rights movement.
Tyler was joined by Virginia's senior senator Louise Thornton (D) and congresswoman Allison Baynes (D) to watch as the statue of Lee was removed by workers. Speaker of the House Daniel Maddox (D-IL) praised the removal, calling on Congress to continue removing "monuments to hate", including other monuments to Confederates, in the Capitol.