Confederate General Robert E. Lee statue removed

It has stood on a 40-foot pedestal in downtown Richmond, Virginia, for 131 years. Now the 12-ton statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee on a horse is in two pieces.

It took workers close to two hours from the time the statue was on the ground to saw off the torso of Lee and load it onto a flatbed truck.

A crowd of hundreds began singing, "Hey, hey, hey, goodbye!" as the statue was hoisted down on Wednesday morning in the city which once served as the capital of the South during the Civil War. Democratic Governor Ralph Northam and other state officials stood looking on.

"This is hopefully part of a new day, a new era in Virginia and this country where we can welcome people and embrace the diversity," Northam said, adding that the removal was overdue because Confederate history doesn't represent what Virginia is. He also said it is wrong that "individuals like Robert Lee chose to be traitor to the United States, to fight against the Constitution to promote slavery".

Richmond Democratic State Senator Jennifer McClellan had just dropped off her children at school and rushed to the site when she heard cheers go up. She ran to see, and a few minutes later, dripping with sweat, McClellan, who is black, fought back tears. "I think the healing can begin," she said.

The statue was erected in 1890 as the first of 15 Confederate monuments that dotted Monument Avenue and was the last to come down. The base of the statue was covered in graffiti during the Black Lives Matter movement after George Floyd an African American man, was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020.

Northam issued an executive order to remove the statue in June 2020, but the order faced legal challenges. On Sept 2, the Supreme Court of Virginia ruled last week the monument could be taken down.

The Confederate statues lined the downtown thoroughfare that served as a line separating black and white neighborhoods. The city took steps beginning in July 2020 to remove 14 other statues. After the Lee statue came down, only one statue remains, that of Arthur Ashe, a black tennis champion who pushed for the advancement of civil rights and was raised in Richmond.

Former president Donald Trump on Wednesday criticized the removal of the Lee statue and issued a historically inaccurate statement:

"Robert E. Lee is considered by many Generals to be the greatest strategist of them all," Trump said. "President Lincoln wanted him to command the North, in which case the war would have been over in one day. Robert E. Lee instead chose the other side because of his great love of Virginia, and except for Gettysburg, would have won the war.

"He should be remembered as perhaps the greatest unifying force after the war was over, ardent in his resolve to bring the North and South together through many means of reconciliation and imploring his soldiers to do their duty in becoming good citizens of this Country."

After being placed on the truck bed, the two pieces of the statue left in a thunderstorm to an undisclosed state-owned facility until a decision is made about its final disposition.