At a foundry last weekend, with fire blazing and anti-racist activists watching, the statue of the Confederate general Robert E Lee that sparked the deadly 2017 Charlottesville white nationalist riot was cut into pieces and melted down to liquid brass.
“It felt like an execution,” said Jalane Schmidt, co-founder of Charlottesville Black Lives Matter and a professor at the University of Virginia.
Along with other activists, Schmidt traveled from Charlottesville to watch the melting at the foundry, which organizers will only identify as being “somewhere in the south” out of concerns for the physical safety of the foundry workers.
“It was very solemn. Nobody cheering, nothing like that. It was very quiet. People weren’t even talking,” she said.
The melting was the culmination of a years-long effort to remove the Confederate statue from downtown Charlottesville. The issue became a flashpoint in 2016, and sparked a deadly white nationalist riot a year later, in 2017, which resulted in the death of the counter-protester Heather Heyer and two police officers, whose helicopter crashed.
After a series of lawsuits, the statue was finally removed in 2021 to much fanfare. It had been sitting in a warehouse in an undisclosed location until even more lawsuits made their way through the justice system. Then, on 26 September this year, the final lawsuit ended. The statue could be melted down.
The melting project, formally known as Swords into Plowshares, was organized by the Charlottesville non-profit organization Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. The organization’s proposal for what to do with the Confederate statue unanimously won Charlottesville city council approval in 2021.
For many in the crowd at the foundry on the day of the melting, the fight over the Lee statue was personal.
“I thought of everything that had happened in the last six and a half years,” said Lisa Draine, interim project director for Swords into Plowshares. “On August 11 and 12, 2017, with my two daughters, I stood up to torch-bearing neo-Nazis and white nationalists with guns in our streets. My family was traumatized when my younger daughter was badly injured in the terrorist car attack that killed Heather Heyer and injured dozens that day. Our lives would never be the same. The fight to remove Confederate statues from our parks became personal.”
Among those activists watching was the Rev Isaac Collins, a pastor in Charlottesville during the summer of 2017.
“To be present was … it’s hard to put into words,” Collins said. “We were a part of this hundred-year history of resistance to the statue, but also this 400-year legacy of race in the United States. So, it was very gratifying. It was very sobering. It was humbling.”
He and the group watched as foundry workers placed pieces of the statue into the furnace one-by-one. Among them was Lee’s head.
“The process took hours. We were outside and night had fallen. The statue’s face, mask-like, began to glow,” said Draine. “At one moment, balanced on the fiery furnace, it looked like Lee’s bronze face was crying. I know I was.”
Once the statue was melted down, the foundry workers poured the molten metal, which looked “like lava”, in Schmidt’s words, into oblong blocks of brass from molds.
“When we saw it removed from the ingots, there were these different variations in the color, and the sculptors told me that it was because of impurities in the bronze,” said Collins. “It seemed very fitting. The impure nature of what these statues have always stood for, sort of living on in the material that they were created out of.”
Many other localities, including Richmond, Virginia, which memorably removed its Robert E Lee statue in 2021, have been unable to find appropriate museums to house the statues and instead are left storing the pieces in an informal “statue graveyard”. Melting a Confederate statue is unprecedented.
“It’s something that hasn’t been tried before, just melting down these Confederate statues,” Schmidt said. “And I know it’s controversial and I don’t take lightly doing this.”
Next, Swords into Plowshares will solicit artist proposals for a public art installation made of the brass from the Lee statue. Their aim is to install the new public art piece before the 10th anniversary of the Summer of Hate, on 12 August 2027.
