Under Cover: Clandestine Removals of Confederate Statues
For years before the July removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, I envisioned what the event might look like. In my imagination, on the day of its removal I’d be standing at the edge of the city park where the statue was raised ninety-eight years ago, cheering as Lee and his horse were severed from their pedestal and lowered unceremoniously onto the back of a flatbed truck, bound for ignominy. Mayor Nikuyah Walker would speak, summoning the fierce poetics that led her to compare our “beautiful-ugly” city to a rapist who “tells you to keep its secrets.” As we applauded her I’d be jostled by the crowd, my crowd: Charlottesville residents who have long wished the statue gone.[1] But I feared the removals would instead unfold in the way they have in so many cities: under cover of darkness, or at best in the wan light of dawn, with few witnesses and minimal media coverage. This in an effort to thwart the type of deadly violence that made “Charlottesville” a shorthand for racist America in August 2017. In the very moment of small triumphs, as the statues are dismantled, the white supremacists who championed them steal one more thing from us: our opportunity to come together as an anti-racist public.
Figure 1. Scene at the unveiling of the monument to General Robert E. Lee at Richmond, Virginia, drawn by Thure De Thulstrup from a photograph, published in Harper’s Weekly on June 14, 1890. Source: Richmond Nineteenth-Century Print Collection, Virginia Commonwealth Library, Richmond, Virginia.
The removal last week of the Lee statue in Richmond, Va.—at 60 feet high, the largest Confederate statue in the nation—drew a small but ardent crowd that sang and chanted as the iconic monument to Jim Crow was dismantled during the early morning hours. But compared to the erection of the statue 131 years ago, its removal, though deeply moving, was perfunctory. A century ago Confederate statues were erected with great pomp and circumstance, bands blaring and children singing, citizens marching and dignitaries orating: a racist public celebrating white power at the top of its voice (Figure 1). Most of them have come down quietly, anti-racists (or those forced to do our will) removing them from the public stage as unobtrusively and clandestinely as possible. Groups have indeed gathered, summoned by Twitter and Facebook, and they were gleeful. But there has been little or no official marking of these historic moments of the cleansing of public spaces, no pomp or pageantry to mark the ejection of monuments erected with such blatant display of state power. Recently the House of Representatives voted to remove all statues of Confederates from the U.S. Capitol; I fear a similarly quiet and disquieting non-event, carried out overnight, discomfiting the fewest number of people, like highway repaving or subway repairs. This feels like a further injustice.
I’m happy to report that Charlottesville got more of a chance to celebrate than most places. On July 9, a Friday, the removal was scheduled for the following day; while no time was announced, the network of local activists who had long lobbied for the statue’s removal gathered early in the morning in time to watch Lee deposed. (I, alas, was out of town and had to watch on Twitter.) Mayor Walker thanked the high school student, Zyahna Bryant, who in 2016—as a ninth-grader—started the petition to remove Lee. Bryant reminded the assembly that this was only the tip of the iceberg. Mayor Walker concurred: “Today the statue comes down and we are one step closer to a perfect union.”[2] Then suddenly Lee was the one in straps and chains, and with a heave-ho from the crane he was deposited on a flatbed and run out of town (Figure 2). A statue of Stonewall Jackson and a statue of Lewis and Clark were also removed the same day. Sometimes dreams come true.
Figure 2. Lee statue rolling out of Charlottesville on a flatbed truck, July 10, 2021. Natalie Krovetz.
Charlottesville’s decision to remove these statues in the bright light of day marks a sharp contrast to the clandestine removals in many other cities. I credit our unflinching mayor, not only for the forthright removals but for the surgical precision with which the statues were excised from our landscape: she gave the white supremacists no time to gather, thereby creating a safe space for the activists who had made this moment happen. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimated in a report dated February 2021 that at least 312 Confederate symbols had been removed from public spaces since the Charleston, S.C. shootings in 2015. Of these, 167 symbols—including 94 monuments—were removed or renamed in the second half of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd; Virginia led the way with 71 symbols.[3] I’m not the first one to notice the clandestine nature of these removals. A New York Times article in June 2019 reported on take-downs by protesters or by city decree “in the dark of night.” When I assigned a seminar of fifteen students last fall to select a statue removal to research, many of the ones they chose—Jacksonville, Florida; Louisville, Kentucky; Austin, Texas—had been removed clandestinely, a fact they remarked on in class. Over the course of one night, July 23-24, 2020, eight statues including one of Lee were removed “under darkness and in secrecy” from the Old House Chamber at the Virginia Capitol in Richmond, the room where treasonous lawmakers met when Richmond served as the capital of the Confederacy. The Washington Post, reporting the story, said the House Speaker “took a page from Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney’s playbook and simply acted without announcing it first.” Stoney removed more than a dozen Confederate memorials around Richmond, including generals J.E.B. Stuart, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and Jefferson Davis from Monument Avenue, using a playbook he borrowed from former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who in the spring of 2017 removed three Confederate statues from downtown New Orleans during the night. In Loudon County, Virginia, only the security cameras at the Leesburg Courthouse captured the nighttime dismantling of “Silent Sentinel” statue erected in 1908 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). It was returned to the UDC, as was the “Appomattox” statue of a generic Confederate soldier that stood in Alexandria. The scene in Alexandria was “decidedly anticlimactic,” the Virginia Mercury reported, with “no cheering crowds . . . no charges of disorderly conduct or arrests.” The story linked to a reporter’s Twitter account, where what I’m assuming was a video documenting the take-down is now buried beneath another year’s worth of tweets. The Alexandria removal, also requested by the UDC, was filmed by CNN and covered by various news organizations; at the time, the UDC declined to tell the city where it was taking the statue. Mayor Justin Wilson, among others, documented the removal on his Twitter feed. The UDC also removed, between 11:30 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. on October 20, 2020, a Confederate soldier statue in Lexington, North Carolina. "I am not aware of the storage location," Lexington Mayor Newell Clark said. "I didn't want to know." So we have work orders and security cameras instead of parades and proclamations, and statues seemingly abducted to an unknown destination as if they were entering the federal witness protection program.
Clandestine removals shield activists and city officials from further harassment and threats from white supremacists: I get that. But they also protect the white supremacists from facing inconvenient truths about the anti-racists they share America with. A ceremony would make anti-racism public—and ordinary. Protestors who tear down statues can be dismissed as lawless; elected officials who usher unwanted bronze Confederates out of town, not so much. Not commemorating these partial rightings of historic wrongs suggests we’re embarrassed about what we’re doing, or that we don’t want our actions to inconvenience anyone who might not agree with us. Here-tonight-gone-tomorrow-morning further assuages white fragility. I also fret about the archive. With no official event, there are no official documents beyond, what, work orders? And therefore no production of archival evidence as it is traditionally conceived. The removal of Confederate statues has become just another public works task.
“Charlottesville’s decision to remove these statues in the bright light of day marks a sharp contrast to the clandestine removals in many other cities.”
There have of course been some removals overseen by elected officials. The fourth statue removed in New Orleans, a Lee statue perched on a sixty-foot-high column, was announced in advance and held in the middle of the day; Mayor Landrieu spoke, and people lined the street in celebration and protest (Figure 3). Just down the street from Charlottesville’s’ Lee statue, the removal of a statue of “Johnny Reb” from the county courthouse lawn was attended by the Albemarle County Chairman, who began the proceedings by proclaiming that “today we disarm our Court Square.” And Twitter feeds, digital journalists, and individual social media accounts have of course valiantly documented other take-downs. Tipped off by a former student, I watched as the first Richmond statue, of Stonewall Jackson, came down on July 1, 2020 (Figure 4). Planned for dawn, it was delayed as public works staff struggled to figure out how to disengage the horses’ hooves from the pedestal. In my notes, I recorded comments from the assembled crowd: “Whose streets? Our streets!” “Fuck you, statue!” “I’m so hot; I was in the shade when this started.” “Flex your knees, flex your knees, remember.” “Oh, the cellist is here!” At one point a white man stormed the statue, crying. After he was dragged away by police, members of the crowd grabbed his “Save Confederate Monuments” flag, wiped their bottoms with it, then set it on fire. Maybe this is all the pageantry we need; it certainly was satisfying.
Figure 3. Robert E Lee statue at Lee Circle in New Orleans being removed from atop its column, May 19, 2017. Infrogmation of New Orleans, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
As I was reporting this essay I searched various archives for artifacts from the dedication ceremonies of Confederate statues—examples of the kinds of evidence I’d love to see generated as they are removed. I found a doozy in Dallas: June 12, 1936, the unveiling of a Lee statue in an eponymous park. The mayor made a speech vowing the statue—equestrian, like the one in Charlottesville—"shall stand here on this busy corner of our city as a perpetual memorial to the character, valor and achievements of this matchless leader of our own Lost Cause.” The 23rd Infantry Band played; 25,000 spectators attended; President Franklin D. Roosevelt, assisted by a Lee descendant, unveiled the bronze behemoth after calling Lee “one of our greatest American Christians and our greatest American gentlemen.” Sculptor A. Phimister Proctor, quoting southern historian W.E. Woodward, declared Lee not just an exceptional human but “a force like God, or electricity.” Mrs. Roosevelt (et tu, Eleanor?) was presented with a bouquet of cape-jasmine. Boy Scouts held flags representing various epochs of Texas history and “young ladies” stood next to them at the base of the statue dressed in “costumes of the period.” We know all this not only because the newspapers covered the dedication, but because the Dallas Southern Memorial Association printed and distributed programs commemorating it, and copies of that program survive in the Dallas Municipal Archives and on the web, where I found a copy.[4] The Twitter feed I watched while the Stonewall Jackson statue came down in Richmond captured as many important and poignant details as that 1936 program, but where is that artifact preserved? Perhaps the important thing to remember, and archive, from the recent spate of takedowns is not the removals themselves, but the protests that led up to those removals. But aren’t we losing something by not commemorating the removals themselves? Can the absence of the statues preserve and convey the history of the wounds they inflicted for so many decades?
Figure 4. Stonewall Jackson statue removed from Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, on July 1, 2020. Zach Clarke.
Or perhaps my desire for a very public detox, enshrined in institutional archives, is another example of misguided whiteness. At the Charlottesville City Council meeting on June 7, 2021, before the council voted to remove the statues, there was one last opportunity for public comments. It went on for five hours and featured the usual range of grief, resentment, anger, and hope. A number of speakers called for “transformation” of the statue, transformation as in melt the suckers down. “Public art from the beginning of the twentieth century is now recognized as propaganda,” said a local artist, who called for new monuments “forged from the remains” of these Civil War generals. Visceral: I liked it. The enthusiasm for melting down the statues spoke to my desire for catharsis. Or is what I think of as catharsis actually a desire to perform my white allyship—a charge you could also level at this essay? At the end of the City Council meeting, before the council voted, Mayor Walker offered some perspective on the white voices raised in fervent support of cleansing our landscapes of these monuments. “We shouldn’t need the white elite” to speak with African Americans to be heard on this topic, she said. Or, perhaps, to bear witness—or create archives—for the future.
“Or perhaps my desire for a very public detox, enshrined in institutional archives, is another example of misguided whiteness.”
Figure 5. Bust of York, Mount Tabor, February 2021. Another Believer, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
More City Council meetings will be devoted to deciding exactly what to do with Charlottesville’s statues. A million dollars has been appropriated for their removal, storage, or covering; the city has so far received ten proposals from sites interested in housing the statues. Conversations about future uses for public spaces cleansed of statues have already begun in earnest. Some citizens are taking matters into their own hands: in Portland, Oregon, after a statue of a newspaper editor who opposed women’s suffrage was toppled in Mount Tabor Park, an unknown sculptor installed—under cover of night—a bust of York, the only Black member of the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery, on the plinth (Figure 5). More academic solutions include replacing the statues with monuments to overlooked historical figures, converting sites into spaces for art or performance pieces, installing murals or light sculptures, and leaving spaces empty to facilitate evolving public practices of memorialization, commemoration, and community. Scholars like Dell Upton and Mabel Wilson as well as the Mellon Foundation have challenged us to re-imagine public space and the role architecture can or cannot play in spatial justice.
In Charlottesville, a team of stone masons sliced the stone pedestals the statues stood on into chunks that will be stored until final decisions are made about next steps. I expect those discussions to be led by the same group of committed activists, most of them Black women, who led the fight to remove the statues. I can’t anticipate what their priorities will be. I’m disgusted to think that Lee & Co. might end up sunning themselves in a grassy field in the Shenandoah Valley, as the Johnny Reb statue has, where unreconstructed neo-confederates will gather to honor their treasonous heroes. So I hope that the statues will be melted down or destroyed. (In Richmond, Lee was cut in two before being hauled off to storage, and the graffiti-covered pedestal remains in place for now.) But activists may have different goals. If so, the “transformation” I need to focus on will be a personal one, from imagining outcomes to honoring them.
I do hope, however, that Charlottesville’s—and now Richmond’s—approach to removing its statues will inspire other localities to do the same: remove statues in the light of day, in front of spectators and media, with remarks from officials and activists who remind us that the hard work of anti-racism lies ahead. With this, the removals become a call to action, the inaugural performance of spatial justice on sites that for a century held space for white supremacy.
Notes
[1] In 1998, many years before I became an historian, I wrote a letter of complaint to the local newspaper about the public funds being spent to maintain the statue. “Let it rot,” I suggested, a sentiment that provoked several readers to call me on the telephone and suggest I relocate to Russia.
[2] Thanks to local Twitter journalist Molly Conger (@socialistdogmom) for her videos of and reporting on the removal, from whence this account and quotes are drawn. Another indispensable local source: Take ‘Em Down Cville.
[3] At the time of the SPLC report, 2,100 Confederate symbols remained, of which 704 were statues.
[4] Dallas sold its equestrian Lee—with the caveat it couldn’t be displayed locally—in an online auction for $1.4 million.
