In 2017, a few of Wickham’s descendants urged the town to take away the statue. Accomplice monuments are a significant flashpoint in Virginia and
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In 2017, a few of Wickham’s descendants urged the town to take away the statue.
Accomplice monuments are a significant flashpoint in Virginia and elsewhere within the South. Accomplice memorials started coming down after a white supremacist killed 9 black individuals at a Bible research in a church in South Carolina in 2015 after which once more after the lethal white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
Final week, Gov. Ralph Northam introduced {that a} state-owned statue of former Accomplice Gen. Robert E. Lee could be faraway from its perch on the famed Monument Avenue “as quickly as doable.”
The Lee statue is one among 5 Accomplice monuments alongside Monument Avenue, a prestigious residential avenue and Nationwide Historic Landmark district. Monuments alongside the avenue have been rallying factors throughout protests in latest days over Floyd’s demise, and so they have been tagged with graffiti, together with messages that say “Finish police brutality” and “Cease white supremacy.”
Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney final week introduced plans to hunt the elimination of the opposite Accomplice monuments alongside Monument Avenue, which embrace statues of Accomplice President Jefferson Davis and Accomplice Gens. Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart. These statues sit on metropolis land, not like the Lee statue, which is on state property.
Stoney stated he would introduce an ordinance July 1 to have the statues eliminated. That’s when a brand new legislation goes into impact, which was signed earlier this yr by Northam, that undoes an present state legislation defending Accomplice monuments and as an alternative lets native governments determine their destiny.
Wickham’s statue stood in Monroe Park, a couple of mile away from the Lee statue and surrounded by the Virginia Commonwealth College campus.