(RNS) — Community leaders in Charlottesville, Virginia, have melted down a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, the removal of which spurred violent protests in 2017 that resulted in the killing of a counterprotester by a white supremacist.
Among the leaders of the project, known as the Swords Into Plowshares initiative, is Jalane Schmidt, a religious studies professor at the University of Virginia, where throngs of protesters marched with torches the night before the August 2017 Unite the Right rally.
On Thursday (Oct. 26), Schmidt, who is also director of the Memory Project at UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy, an effort launched in the aftermath of the Charlottesville violence, opened a news conference by reciting Scripture that calls on believers to beat swords into plowshares.
“We’re here to announce that we’ve melted the Lee statue,” Schmidt said, to applause. She later added: “Creativity and art can express democratic, inclusive values. We believe that art has the potential to heal.”
Organizers said they plan to hire an artist to use the bronze from the statue to form a new art piece, although details have yet to be worked out.
The announcement is the coda in a yearslong legal battle over the statue. After the white supremacist rally ravaged the city, local elected officials voted unanimously to donate the statue in late 2021 to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, a local Black-led nonprofit that funds the Swords Into Plowshares initiative. Shortly thereafter, two groups — Trevilian Station Battlefield Foundation, which oversees a Civil War battlefield elsewhere in Virginia, and the Ratcliffe Foundation, which manages a museum in Russell County with ties to a Confederate general — filed suit in an attempt to halt efforts to melt the monument down.
But the groups, both of which had submitted unsuccessful bids for the statue, ultimately failed in court. A judge removed the Ratcliffe Foundation from the case in May and dismissed most of Trevilian Station Battlefield Foundation’s case in July. Trevilian Station effectively ended its legal efforts later that month.
Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, said during the news conference that project leaders are just beginning the process of selecting a jury to help decide which artist or group will create the replacement artwork. They hope to gather sculpture specialists, historians and “people who understand our narrative deeply,” she said.
The destruction of the statue, which was removed from a city park in July 2021, actually began over the weekend: The head was melted down in an undisclosed location, as was the sword.
The Rev. Isaac Collins, a United Methodist minister in Charlottesville, was part of a small group allowed to witness the melting of the statue. He told Religion News Service he spoke to the assembly shortly before the process began and quoted Psalm 135:15-18, which states “the idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of human hands. … They have mouths, but they do not speak. … Those who make them, and all who trust them, shall become like them.”
Collins said he had used the Scripture passage before in a 2019 public Bible study in Charlottesville that focused on racism because it helped “define the role that these statues played as idols for white supremacy.” He also reflected on events surrounding the erection of the statue in 1924, when the Klu Klux Klan staged cross burnings in the city and organized a march through a predominantly Black neighborhood.
“All of these things were connected in creating a culture of death that the Lee statue symbolized,” he said. Melting it down, he explained, was a literal enactment of Isaiah 2:2-4 — turning “swords into plowshares.”
