The divisive Confederate monument, the focus of the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, was melted down in secret and will become a new piece of public art.
SOMEWHERE IN THE U.S. SOUTH — It was a choice to melt down Robert E. Lee. But it would have been a choice to keep him intact, too.in 2017 — was now being cut into fragments and dropped into a furnace, dissolving into a sludge of glowing bronze.
“Well, they can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” said Andrea Douglas, the museum’s executive director, as she watched pieces of oxidized metal descend into the furnace. “There will be no tape for that.”, a project led by the two women, will turn bronze ingots made from molten Lee into a new piece of public artwork to be displayed in Charlottesville. They made arrangements for Lee to be melted down while they started collecting ideas from city residents for that new sculpture.
That happened under sometimes urgent deadlines, amid security concerns and the logistical challenges of handling about 6,000 pounds of bronze. The metal requires a forklift to be moved even just a few yards, much less out of Virginia.it reached the foundry, Lee was cut down into nine pieces — although museum leaders declined to say where or when. The general’s head was removed from his body and his horse, Traveller, but it needed to be broken down further to fit into the small furnace here.
Douglas paid tribute to the nearly 15,000 enslaved people who lived in Charlottesville at the start of the Civil War and made up a majority of the town’s population. Schmidt spoke about the “moral risk” of keeping Confederate statues intact. In the five-year debate over whether it could be toppled, the monument had been “patrolled” by armed vigilante groups and vandalized with paint and graffiti by protesters. Residents fought over whether it should be shrouded in black cloth, and politicians on the campaign trail cited the statue as a symbol of either heritage or hatred.
To him, melting the statue down meant the trauma will be gone when Black people pass squares where Confederate statues once stood. “It is time to dismantle this hate, this infection that has plagued our beautiful country,” he said. “It is time to rid these icons of hate.”Hours later into the night, he and another metal-caster used a set of lifting tongs to pick up the crucible, a ceramic container that holds the bronze inside the furnace.
All of them, though, had been instructed to disable the location on their phones. Charlottesville activists have faced online attacks and had tiki torches planted in their front yards, and the organizers didn’t want a repeat incident here.The foundry workers poured the crucible into custom-made iron molds, which are meant to leave the Swords Into Plowshares logo etched onto the ingots.
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