VA Supreme Court Says Dead White Men Do Not Rule: Remove the Damn Statue!

The statue of Confederate military leader, anti-United States successionist General Robert E. Lee has loomed six stories tall over Virginia’s state government and its citizens in Richmond since 1890. After a never-ending series of court battles, the VA Supreme Court ruled definitively last Thursday that the state of Virginia may now begin to disassemble the infamous, 12-ton statue.

The court ruled that "restrictive covenants" in the 1887 and 1890 deeds that transferred the statue to the state no longer apply. In June 2021

Virginia Solicitor General Toby Heytens argued before the court for less than a minute last June, regarding one of two cases seeking to block removal of the Lee statue that “no court has ever recognized a personal, inheritable right to dictate the content of poor government speech about a matter of racial equality, and this court should not be the first one ever to do so.”

Virginians who sued to keep the Confederate General in place to rule over Richmond are Helen Marie Taylor, John-Lawrence Smith, Evan Morgan Massey, Janet Heltzel and George D. Hostetler — and, in the second case, William Gregory, a descendant of the original landowners.

"Those restrictive covenants are unenforceable as contrary to public policy and for being unreasonable because their effect is to compel government speech, by forcing the Commonwealth to express, in perpetuity, a message with which it now disagrees," the justices wrote.

Gov. Ralph Northam said upon the announcement of the court’s ruling: “Today it is clear—the largest Confederate monument in the South is coming down.”

Over a hundred thousand witnesses attended the erection and unveiling of the statue in 1890. The event represented a clear turn in the burgeoning growth of perpetuating a Southern Lost Cause mythology.

As historian David Blight wrote in ‘Race and Reunion’, “More than ghosts emerged from the Richmond unveiling of 1890; a new, more dynamic Lost Cause was thrown into bold relief as well. “

Blight set the stage for the unveiling: “The orator, Archer Anderson, treasurer of the Tredegar Iron Works, set the tone for the Lee remembered, the man of “moral strength and moral beauty.” The monument, said Anderson, stood not for “a record of civil strife, but as a perpetual protest against whatever is low and sordid in our public and private objects.”’

Clearly slavery didn’t qualify as “low and sordid” in the minds of the massive crowd. But as newspapers noted across America, the statue forced the entire nation to explain away Lee’s alleged greatness as millions came to worship at the altar of the Confederate general.

In its own legal documents before the court, the current state of Virginia wrote:

“Symbols matter, and the Virginia of today can no longer honor a racist system that enslaved millions of people. Installing a grandiose monument to the Lost Cause was wrong in 1890, and demanding that it stay up forever is wrong now.”

Related: Virginia Museum Will Lead Efforts to Reimagine Richmond Avenue Once Lined With Confederate Monuments Smithsonian Magazine