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An iconic monument of the Confederacy, a prominent statue of General Robert E. Lee is coming down in Virginia.
Democratic governor, Ralph Northam, announced plans on Thursday that he will remove the statue which stands in a prominent place in Richmond.
READ MORE: Mississippi governor declares April ‘Confederate Heritage Month’
According to CNN, the governor will order the statue to be moved from its massive pedestal and placed in storage until Northam’s administration finds a new place for it.
The statue is one of five Confederate monuments on a street called Monument Avenue in the National Historic Landmark District. The monuments have been sites of protests in Virginia in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd. The monuments have been tagged with graffiti including messages of “end police brutality,” and “stop white supremacy.”
The Richmond city government also announced on Wednesday that the city’s mayor and a city council member will — on July 1 — introduce an ordinance to bring down all the Confederate monuments on Monument Avenue in the former capital city of the Confederacy.
The removal of Confederate monuments was one of the catalysts for the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA where far-right, white-nationalist militias marched and chanted statements like, “Jews will not replace us,” and “blood and soil.”
The rally took place in 2017 and one counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was killed during the event.
Historians have noted that the preservation of Confederate statues wrongly honors long-deceased supporters of the enslavement of Africans in America. However, others argue that they should not be destroyed, but somehow become lessons for the country to learn from the ugliness of the past.
READ MORE: Alabama Supreme Court ruled Birmingham cannot move nor change Confederate monuments
Confederate memorials across the south became a hot-spot in the Black Lives Matter movement after Dylann Roof murdered nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Del. Jay Jones, a Black lawmaker said he was overcome with emotion when he heard the statue was coming down, “That is a symbol for so many people, black and otherwise, of a time gone by of hate and oppression.”
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