The Robert E. Lee Statue Surrenders to the Furnace was reported in The New York Times

Replacing General Robert E. Lee’s Face to the Vicious Black Hole: Making Art in a Demonstration

In the last few years, Confederate monuments in public spaces have been removed. Some have gone to museums, others are locked away in storage.

The massive bronze sculpture of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, in uniform, astride his horse Traveller, stood in a downtown Charlottesville park for nearly a century. It was at the center of a deadly white nationalist rally in 2017, when Neo-Nazis and white supremacists tried to stop the city’s plans to remove the statue.

“We want to transform something that has been toxic in the Charlottesville community,” says Jalane Schmidt, a religious studies professor at the University of Virginia and one the project’s organizers. “We want to transform it into a work of art that our community can be proud of and be able to gather around and not feel excluded or intimidated.”

The work is done out of state. NPR agreed to not reveal its location or the identity of the workers because they were afraid of repercussions.

The symbolism is very touching for the executive director of the Jefferson School African American Cultural Center, which is doing the project.

The removal of Robert E. Lee’s face is a reflection of the kind of myth-making that has taken place around him.

A furnace is ignited and heats to more than 2000 degrees Fahrenheit in a side yard of the foundry. Workers feed pieces of the verdigris statue, including General Lee’s saber, into a large vessel inside called a crucible.

Douglas says swords are being turned into something else. “That saber is the object of violence and it was the object of power, the object of conquest. I think that is an important symbol to really sort of dig into”

Lee’s Afterlife: Where Are We Going? What Has Happened Since Charlottesville In 2017 and Where is the Rest? A Conversation with Bethe Henderson

Henderson is co-executive director of the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee which has long been an incubator for labor and civil rights activists. She sees opportunity in this moment.

Henderson is most excited about what it looks like to fix, what it looks like to tell a new story, and how it will look like for the people of Virginia. I think this is a joyous occasion that has been surviving in a dire state of political idiocy.

For the Rev. Isaac Collins, a Methodist minister, the deadly white nationalist violence in Charlottesville in 2017 was a turning point for the nation, and personally.

It was a moment when I realized that I did not understand my country, my family or myself the way I should.

“I was thinking Humpty Dumpty couldn’t be put back together again,” says Collins. “We still have a lot of work to do, but this statue that has cost us so much, so much violence, so much hurt, so much bloodshed – it’s gone. And it’s never going to be put back together the way it was.”

I realized two things while covering the story over the last few years. When a monument disappears without a ceremony to mark its removal, the community doesn’t have a way to realize that it has changed. (Ideally the ceremony is public, but because of safety concerns, the melting I attended was not.) If the statue of Lee is put into a hidden storeroom, you will not be less upset than if it is dumped into a landfill. So if all changes, large or small, will be resisted, why not go for the ones with the most symbolic resonance?

Swords Into Plowshares might have been the first to propose melting, but other communities are working out their own creative visions for Lee’s afterlife. One of the biggest changes so far has been at Arlington House, the historic plantation mansion at the center of Arlington National Cemetery, which is the official national Robert E. Lee Memorial. The lives of the families that were enslaved at Arlington House will be shown in displays in the year 2021, after the house reopened. Even Lee’s burial site at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. — where he served as president after the war — has changed. The university decided to focus on Lee the civilian rather than Lee the general, for example by moving a prominent portrait of him in uniform. It built a wall to surround the sculpture of Lee that used to be in the chapel.