Protesters topple Confederate statue in Richmond – POLITICO – POLITICO

In 2017, about a of Wickham’s descendants advised town to purchase away the statue.

Accomplice monuments are a important flashpoint in Virginia and in other locations within the South. Accomplice memorials began coming down after a white supremacist killed 9 dusky other folks at a Bible look in a church in South Carolina in 2015 and on the opposite hand after the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

Final week, Gov. Ralph Northam announced that a disclose-owned statue of old Accomplice Gen. Robert E. Lee would be removed from its perch on the famend Monument Avenue “as soon as seemingly.”

The Lee statue is one among 5 Accomplice monuments alongside Monument Avenue, a prestigious residential aspect freeway and National Historical Landmark district. Monuments alongside the avenue had been rallying sides one day of protests in newest days over Floyd’s death, and they also’ve been tagged with graffiti, including messages that mumble “Smash police brutality” and “Cease white supremacy.”

Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney last week announced plans to look the elimination of the more than just a few Accomplice monuments alongside Monument Avenue, which embody statues of Accomplice President Jefferson Davis and Accomplice Gens. Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart. These statues sit on city land, no longer like the Lee statue, which is on disclose property.

Stoney talked about he would introduce an ordinance July 1 to have the statues removed. That’s when a recent law goes into attain, which became signed earlier this year by Northam, that undoes an reward disclose law maintaining Accomplice monuments and as a substitute lets local governments exercise their fate.

Wickham’s statue stood in Monroe Park, a couple of mile a long way off from the Lee statue and surrounded by the Virginia Commonwealth University campus.