In June 2021, leaders in Charlottesville, Virginia, put out an unusual offer: two bad statues, free to a good home.
The city council issued a request for proposals for statues of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, which had long been the focus of removal efforts by local activists, and served as the backdrop for the deadly white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in 2017. Despite the artworks’ ill repute, dozens of organizations and individuals expressed their interest in taking the disgraced monuments off the city’s hands, and the city received five formal bids.
Competition was steep: The Ratcliffe Foundation, which operates an historic home in Southwest Virginia associated with Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart, offered $50,000 to Charlottesville for the pair. The foundation also asked Richmond for all its Confederate cast-offs — protesters and lawmakers have removed 18 of these monuments from the Virginia capital since June 2020 — in hopes of drawing tourists by relocating, restoring and preserving these relics in their original context as statues of men who fought to uphold slavery. But another group offered Charlottesville twice as much: The Los Angeles-based arts nonprofit LAXART bid $100,000 for both statues, with the hope of showcasing them in a major show of Black contemporary art next year.
In the end, the city chose two winners. On Dec. 7, the Charlottesville City Council voted to donate the Lee memorial to a local party, the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, which plans to melt down the equestrian statue and use the bronze to build something new. The Stonewall Jackson statue is likely heading to the exhibit in L.A., according to a report by the NBC affiliate in Charlottesville.
Confederate monuments belong in a museum, not on a trash heap: That’s a common refrain about the memorials coming down all over the U.S. Stewards of southern heritage have long called for history-minded foundations and institutions to make room for these now-polarizing tributes to the Confederacy. But the meaning of this argument is changing. Some curators are embracing this approach, if only to provide critical historical context for the Jim Crow era that gave rise to these memorials, while others want to give the statues a more sympathetic second act. The case for preservation has been taken up by The New York Times, The Weekly Standard and other publications. “The indecent monuments deserve a decent burial,” Christopher Knight wrote in the Los Angeles Times.