Robert E. Lee wasn’t a Nazi, and surely would have had no sympathy for the white supremacist goons who made his statue a rallying point in Charlottesville, Virginia. That doesn’t change the fact that his statue is now associated with a campaign of racist violence against the picturesque town where Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. The statue of Lee was already slated for removal by the city, but the Battle of Charlottesville should be an inflection point in the broader debate over Confederate statuary.
Time to mothball Confederate statues?
