Confederate Monument Removed from Virginia State Capital

Work to relocate the last Confederate memorial owned by the city of Richmond should begin this week after a judge rejected a request to delay the removal of General AP Hill’s statue from a prominent location in Virginia’s capital city. said the official.

Richmond Circuit Court Judge David Eugene Cheek Sr. last week rejected a motion to halt plans to remove the city from four indirect descendants of Hill who were killed on the final day of the Civil War. .

The process of removing the monument from the busy intersection should begin on Monday, but it’s unclear if it will be completely removed by the end of the week, said WRIC city deputy chief administrative officer Robert Steidl. – told TV.

The city, once the Confederate capital, began removing many other Confederate monuments more than two years ago amid racial justice protests following the murder of George Floyd. Among the notable monuments removed was the striking statue of General Stonewall Jackson, which was removed from its concrete plinth along Virginia’s famous Monument Avenue, Richmond, in 2020.

Richmond officials decided to move the memorial to Virginia’s Black History Museum and Cultural Center. In 1891, however, the general’s body was buried under the monument, complicating the removal of the Hill statue.

Indirect descendants and the city agreed that Richmond’s plan to move Hill’s remains to Culpeper’s cemetery should be allowed to proceed. and hopes to move it to Cedar Mountain Battlefield near the cemetery instead of the museum. Cheek ruled against them in October.

At a recent hearing, Cheek denied their motion to stop the removal of the hill memorial while the descendants appealed to the Virginia Court of Appeals.

The city spent at least $1.8 million to remove other city-owned monuments, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Cheek determined that delaying removal would result in additional costs and potential traffic disruption.

Steidl said in court last week that the memorial will be kept while the case goes through the expected appeals process.

Many Confederate statues in Virginia, decades after the Civil War, during the Jim Crow era when the state imposed new segregation laws, historians and others portray the Southern Rebellion as a battle for defense. It was built during the “Lost Cause” movement that tried to State rights, not slavery.

Those seeking the removal of the statues, especially in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederate Army, said they would find the city no longer a place of symbols of oppression and white supremacy.