‘NO TAPE FOR THAT’

Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee Statue Is Secretly Melted Down at Last

White supremacists mobilized in 2017 to protest the removal of the statue and another of Stonewall Jackson.

Charlottesville’s statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee was cut apart and melted in secret last Saturday, The Washington Post reported Thursday, ending years of uproar and debate surrounding the Confederate monument. White supremacists mobilized in 2017 to protest the removal of that statue and another of Stonewall Jackson—a deadly protest known as the Unite the Right rally. City leaders voted to ditch the monuments four years later and hand the Lee statue over to the Charlottesville Black History Museum. After various legal challenges wrapped up recently, the museum finally melted down the statue—but did so at a secret location due to fears of violence, the Post reported. It will be re-made into a new art project sometime in the future. “Well, they can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” the museum’s executive director Andrea Douglas told the Post. “There will be no tape for that.”