Plans to melt, transform Lee statue

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (WVIR) - The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center is readying connected melting down Charlottesville’s statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee by February and alteration it into a enactment of nationalist art.

“It feels really, truly eminent and historic,” Executive Director Dr. Andrea Douglas said. “We don’t privation to instrumentality our trauma and person it moved to different community. The thought that you instrumentality an entity that has truthful galore connotations that are associated with achromatic supremacy, and past let it to spell to different assemblage wherever they person to contend with those objects. It feels immoral to us.”

Douglas says the full nationalist creation project, Swords into Plowshares, volition outgo astir $1.1 million.

“We person already raised $590,000 successful gifts from the Virginia Humanities Open Source, which is 1 of the largest foundations successful the country. They person already participated successful monument processes,” Douglas said.

Jalane Schmidt is the manager of the UVA Democracy Initiatives Memory Project, which is simply a co-sponsor of the creation project.

“The statute volition inactive beryllium here. It’ll beryllium present with us. Whatever gets created retired of these repurposed materials volition beryllium present with us,” Schmidt said.

This enactment of art, Schmidt says, volition narrate the full communicative of however the statue came to be.

Click present if you’re funny successful donating to the Swords into Plowshares project.

RELATED: Charlottesville gives Lee statue to enactment with plans to melt, alteration it

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