The Hot Market for Toppled Confederate Statues
Artists, museums and other groups are vying to claim fallen monuments from the Jim Crow era — but for very different reasons.
Last ride: A statue of Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson is trucked away from Charlottesville, Virginia, in July — and bound for a museum exhibition in Los Angeles in 2022.
Photographer: Win McNamee/Getty Images North AmericaIn June 2021, leaders in Charlottesville, Virginia, put out an unusual offer: two bad statues, free to a good home.
The city council issued a request for proposals for statues of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, which had long been the focus of removal efforts by local activists, and served as the backdrop for the deadly white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally in 2017. Despite the artworks’ ill repute, dozens of organizations and individuals expressed their interest in taking the disgraced monuments off the city’s hands, and the city received five formal bids.