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. It came down to cheers in July of 2021.
Dr. Jalane Schmidt has been part of the group of activists, scholars, and historians fighting not only to have the statue removed, but to doing something transformative and radical with it - melt it down. In this interview, she discusses the long legal battles to arrive at this moment, the ways armed Neo-Conferederates terrorized the public space surrounding the monument for years, and why melting it down was a moral risk worth taking.
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Gift link Washington Post article which includes exclusive video footage of the Lee statue meltdown, as well as an interview with me in which I discuss “moral risk” of iconoclasm: https://wapo.st/3QGfJVp
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/26/1208603609/confederate-general-robert-e-lee-monument-melted-down-charlottesville-virginia
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
I'm joined today just by an incredible guest, and that is Dr. Jelaine Schmidt.
So, Dr. Schmidt, I'm going to tell people all about you in a second, but first I just want to say thanks for taking the time to do this.
Sure.
Thanks for having me, Brad.
So, Dr. Ghislaine Schmidt, Director of the University of Virginia Karsh Institute of Democracy's Memory Project and an Associate Professor of Religious Studies there at UVA is somebody who's Has a long and accomplished scholarly life, but has spent the last few years deeply involved in a project called Swords into Plowshares, along with several others as part of the steering committee of that project.
And it's an initiative to melt down Charlottesville's Robert E. Lee statue to create new public art.
There's a documentary or a short film called Unveiling the Origin of Charlottesville's Monuments and streaming on PBS now.
And we're here to talk because the monument was melted down just a bit ago.
And I want to talk about that and other things with you.
I want to start with just a little bit of history.
This movement to remove the Lee statue started about seven years ago, if I'm not mistaken, with a high school student named Zanna Bryant, who started a petition to have the statue removed.
I grew into one of the most infamous episodes in the Trump presidency because the decision to remove the statue ignited and led to the Unite the Right rally.
That is where Heather Heyer lost her life and it is where in the wake of it Trump said there were fine people on both sides.
I think as I say that people can remember those episodes painfully and with remorse and not really wanting to.
You have been on the ground That entire period.
What happened after the Charlottesville Unites the Right rally and today to get us to the point where the Lee statue has been melted down?
Yeah, well, that's a nice encapsulation.
I would say, yeah, in 2016, Zion O'Brien's petition was brought to the public and then to city council.
And then we had a series of meetings to discuss how community members felt about public space and the monuments.
Early 2017, the City Council voted to remove the Lee statue.
And I should say a lot of people that aren't, you know, that are not from Charlottesville don't realize that the attacks actually started already in February.
Scuffles on the downtown pedestrian mall, scuffles at the parks, far-right political candidates kind of using this as a launching pad for their campaign and this sort of thing.
So this actually, I mean, just in terms of white supremacist rallies, this started way before what we call the summer of hate in Charlottesville.
That's what we call it because there were actually numerous rallies.
that went on that are less well-known outside the community.
A couple Torch rallies, Proud Boys coming, you know, different Confederate groups, Richard Spencer, Identity Europa, all these groups that were coming.
So 2017, I was very much involved in planning counter-demonstration to all these assorted white supremacists that were coming to town.
Then after the debacle of the Unite the Right rally captured international attention because we were so violently attacked, there was a lot of court actions, a lot of trial, this sort of thing.
So this is like when the cameras go away, the fallout was still happening.
Political and emotional and all that.
So supporting survivors became, you know, important in various ways.
Connecting folks with Legal support, emotional support, therapeutic support, that kind of thing.
And also, uh, something that, that, uh, of which a lot of people aren't aware, who, who aren't from Charlottesville, is that these, uh, uh, white supremacists kept coming back to town, actually.
They kept coming back.
And, uh, uh, Holton holding yet another torch rally in October of 2017, that year.
They came back for other things.
And, Our statues in Charlottesville remained until, for four more years.
I don't think a lot of people realize that.
For four more years after the Unite the Right rally, those statues were still there.
And that's because we were bound by a court order, a judge's injunction.
And the city had to, we were sued by a bunch of neoconfederates, basically, and self-styled statute preservationists.
And the city of Charlottesville had to battle this in court until April of 2021, almost four years after Unite the Right.
So this was going on and on and on and on.
In the meantime, white supremacists had kind of self-appointed statue guards armed themselves.
And Virginia is an open carry state, so one can kind of go around anywhere, at least with the proper permit, and be carrying sidearms and even long guns.
People It's not unknown to go to the Kroger and there's a guy there with a long gun and in the checkout line.
This is, this is our reality that we live in.
So anyway, there, so these, these so-called statue guards started showing up in our parks in 2019 when there was a kind of a spate of, uh, so-called vandalism.
I would call it alteration taken by kind of freelance, uh, activists and, uh, aerosol artists, we might call them.
And so these armed vigilantes started showing up and accosting people, threatening people, this sort of thing.
They were very chummy with the police as well and would call the police when they suspected someone, including myself.
I would be like walking through the park on my way somewhere and all of a sudden police would just materialize, what are you doing?
And it just felt like public space wasn't public space.
Public space only belonged to these neo-Confederates who were patrolling the statues.
And those of us who were kind of publicly identified with the movement to get rid of said statues, it was like this space wasn't ours.
And furthermore, armed vigilantes were there and they were effectively a civilian extension of police surveillance.
And this was going on and on.
In 2019, it really picked up in summer of 2020 during the George Floyd protests because in Richmond, which is just about A 70 minute drive to the east from Charlottesville.
So Richmond is the, you know, former capital.
The Confederacy just dotted with Confederate monuments all over the place.
And during the George Floyd protests in late May and early June, there were kind of bands of protesters going through the streets at night and pulling down statues or spray painting the statue on this sort of thing.
And on one particular night, Somebody threw a Molotov cocktail through the window of the National Headquarters building of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
That is the very organization whose mobilization in the late 19th early 20th century is responsible for having erected a lot of these monuments and then of course in more recent years when different municipalities have tried to remove these monuments then often a local chapter or state division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy would file a lawsuit.
Yeah.
against folks who were trying to make change.
And so it felt very calculated on the part of the protesters who did this.
And I should say, this is about a year or two after Kehinde Wiley's rumors of war monument.
was installed on the neighboring lawn of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which abuts the United Daughters of the Confederacy headquarters building, you see.
And so there's a very potent, you know, kind of expressions about the values in public space.
So someone threw a lollipop cocktail Through the window of the UDC headquarters in Richmond late one night.
Unfortunately, nobody was there.
Nobody was harmed.
Nobody was hurt.
But it did quite a bit of damage.
And as a historian, I just had to say they said it even damaged some of the uh holdings that they had in the library and i'm like don't mess with the archives we need that for the reparations trials well i do not approve that of you know this kind of uh burning of anyway
and and apparently i mean so they say the uh uh the uh confederate flag or the second confederate national confederate flag the one which adorned the casket of uh confederate general uh uh uh stonewall jackson uh was irreparably charged by this fire so So there was a historical artifact that was lost as well.
Anyway, so after that, I think that was the night of June 1st?
2020, if I remember correctly.
Okay.
That's when those so-called vigilantes, you know those statue guards, started coming again.
And they were there all summer long, almost every night in our parks in Charlottesville.
Again, this is three years after Unite the Right.
Yeah.
So this is just a constant theme of there just being All sorts of struggles over the meaning of public space in our community in Charlottesville.
That we're going on and the feeling of intimidation that the supposedly public space but it's being surveilled by people who are very hateful and some of the same people These statues, so-called statue guards, some of them were the same people who'd come to unite the right.
Yeah.
Several years before.
People don't understand that, you know what I mean?
And then some of them were also the same people who were among the plaintiffs who sued Swords into Plowshare a couple years later.
So anyway, so we've been going through a lot.
And part of what happened was that in September 2020, When Albemarle County, that is the county within which Charlottesville is situated, their board of supervisors removed a statue of Johnny Reb, as it's called, a kind of generic Confederate soldier, that was on the courthouse lawn.
And this courthouse, although it's up the county, it's within Charlottesville's downtown.
So they were able, the county, because it controls that little spot of ground there, notwithstanding the fact that it's within Charlottesville, the county was able to remove that statue, one of these mass-produced bronze soldier statues, in September of 2020, while we, the city, still remained.
Okay, under a judge's injunction.
Our statutes were still up.
Again, now we're three years past Unite the Right.
And we had, in early 2020, a bunch of us from Charlottesville had gone to the General Assembly in Richmond and lobbied both the House of Delegates and the Senators, and were successful in getting a 100-year-old law changed.
And this law had prohibited Virginia municipalities from removing these Confederate statues.
So we were really hemmed in by the Nazis on one side of us and the law on the other.
So you have that kind of the extra Extra-legal violent enforcement in the streets, and then the legal apparatus of state statute and judicial processes, lawsuits, that are hemming us in there.
Meanwhile, the police is kind of on the side of so-called law and order.
Yeah, in this thing.
So it was very frustrating.
I mean, it was trauma.
2017 with the Unite the Right rally was trauma, but then it was four additional years.
Yeah.
Until we finally were able to remove these statues in 2021.
And I think a lot of listeners or people outside of Charlottesville just don't realize what a process it was.
And that while all the rest of y'all all over the country, after Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, were walking up your statues and taking them away, we were still sitting there with ours.
And plus those Nazis kept coming back.
Well, and it's almost as if you're describing, you talked about the neo-confederates who sued, and it's almost as if a neo-confederate army, to use one way of putting it, was guarding the Lee statue for these interim years.
Thank you for providing that context.
I think it's easier for people to remember the tiki torches and think, oh, those are just Nazis.
They're zombies.
Who are those people?
And then they left.
Well, no, they were some of the plaintiffs.
They were some of the ones standing near the statue, terrorizing people with their weapons.
They were getting the police called on folks just trying to walk through the park.
So it really provides that local perspective.
Now, if we fast forward till today, the statue has been taken down, of course, and melted down.
Yeah.
You mentioned all the other monuments that have come down across the country.
This one did not just go into a museum.
This one did not go into storage somewhere.
This one was melted.
You've called that a moral choice.
Yeah.
Or a moral risk.
I apologize.
It's a moral risk.
What is the moral risk of melting it down?
Yeah, well, I wrote about this in an op-ed that was published in the Richmond Times Dispatch, and maybe I can send you a link to that so that your listeners can see that, where I kind of laid out what the problems are, okay?
And this was after the county, like I mentioned, removed that Johnny Reb statue in September of 2020.
Meanwhile, our statues are still up, right, in Charlottesville.
What was very dismaying to a lot of us activists there and community members was that the County Board of Supervisors, that municipal body, not the Charlottesville City Council, these are two separate bodies, right?
The County Board of Supervisors gave that removed soldier statue to an organization that was kind of neo-confederate in its leanings.
And that it was clear that was going to present this statue, situate this statue on a battlefield where it would continue to broadcast the same lost cause values that it had been broadcasting for 111 years from the steps of our courthouse.
And so we saw that in fall of 2020 and we said, oh no, this cannot happen with Charlottesville statues.
We got to work planning.
So that is how we really started in earnest.
With figuring out when such time would finally arrive, when the Virginia Supreme Court would finally rule in our favor.
And this was a leap of faith.
We didn't know if that would even happen at all.
But like, let's get the practical steps together to make sure that our statute is not simply just what I call shipping our toxic waste down the road.
That's not responsible.
That's not a responsible.
If this thing is so harmful, In your community, if it is known to be a beacon for white supremacists, and as I've just described, for four years after Unite the Right, they were still coming.
Okay, but it was like their little rallying point.
We didn't, that would not have been responsible ethically, morally, to simply send, oh this community over here wants it, well let's send it to them.
That's not responsible.
And so we really had to think About what we could do.
And the handy-dandy solution that's often offered is, well, we'll just put the, if you remove the statue, just put it in a museum.
Okay?
And philosophically, I am all in favor of that.
I mean, I'm a historian, that sort of thing.
I go to museums and there's all kinds of crazy stuff and say, if it's properly curated, well, So yeah, I think we can learn from these things.
Again, if it's properly framed.
I don't have the same reaction.
Like when I go to a museum, like for instance, at Appomattox in Virginia, which is where the police surrendered to Grant, kind of thus ending the Civil War.
You know, they have Confederate flags on display, but they're under glass.
And it's like, it's being, it's the, I don't have the same visceral reaction that I do when there's a guy in my park holding a Confederate flag in one hand and a gun in the other.
So there is such a thing as responsible curation.
The problem is that practically speaking, we called all around to all the reputable museums, the Smithsonian's, the Museum of American Civil War, all these, you know, even like kind of reputable battlefields that are run by the National Park Service.
It's like, oh, well, this could be appropriate if it's nobody wants it.
Nobody wants this stuff except the very people who shouldn't have it.
There it is.
Okay.
And so it's a practical problem, you know what I mean?
And the moral rub is this, that the statue is a material object that exists in the world.
It is literally taking up space, as I said in that interview in the Washington Post.
It's taking up literal and figurative space.
It has to be Cared for, attended to, somebody has to exist somewhere because it is an object in physical space.
It takes up space.
So the question is where it's going to go.
And no space is morally neutral.
This isn't!
Yeah, any space that you are occupying.
I'm on doing this podcast from Wampanoag territory up near Boston.
You know, we're all on occupied land unless we're native folk, you know, so that's just one example.
You know what I mean?
So there's no morally neutral space.
Even if you remove the... like you could leave the statue in the park and put up a plaque that has kind of mealy mouth phrase and small font about how like oh we don't agree with this anymore but we just... which begs the question why do you still have it?
The statue.
You can remove the statue and put it in storage.
That's what most folks are doing.
It's in storage.
Okay so now it's on some back uh supply lot for the public works yard.
For the city of Charlottesville, or in the case of Richmond, this is my favorite.
It's at the sewage treatment plant.
It's very appropriate.
But that's still taking up space.
But he had to, some city employees had to take a front end loader and level out the ground.
They'll lay down the four by four wooden blocks.
Oh, and this sort of with the, get the forklift.
I mean, it's an expenditure of staff time.
Okay.
And it's literally, again, it's taking up space.
Um, how long is it going to sit there forever?
You're going to take up space?
Really?
That's making choices.
I w I was just looking at, at my budget for the memory project just today.
And we were kind of like figuring out like the expenditures to be made for the Swords into Plowshares project.
Well, I'm dedicating these resources over here to Swords into Plowshares.
It means this, uh, other very deserving project, say a, you know, black history tour, you know, an art exhibit, all these things, but there's not as much money.
For that, that is a moral choice.
I'm saying that we got to get rid of that.
So there's wherever these statues end up, it's a moral choice.
And yeah, but the case is museums don't want them.
The only museums that want them are the very ones that shouldn't have and that would do irresponsible curation.
And so we had to think, you know, especially with this Lee statue, for our community at this time, given what we've gone through and this particular statue, it needs to not be in the world in its current form.
And so that, you know, the risk that we take, it's a lot of money.
Turns out it's a lot of money.
Yeah.
Take statue away, cut it up, and melt it down.
So that, again, that's an expenditure of time, staff time, and resources that could have gone to something else.
But we're taking this step to be responsible, you know?
And it's not, you know, this isn't some kind of gleeful action or something.
I've used the You know, it's like if you have a rabid dog that's going around biting people in the neighborhood.
You know, there's someone who's like, oh, but the dog's so cute.
And it's like, yeah, but it's hurting people and it needs to be euthanized.
You know what I mean?
And we got to just do that as an act of care because it's doing more harm than good.
It's not possible to, it's like...
There's not really a cure for rabies.
It's not possible to, or it would be too much of an expenditure to even try.
It's, it's time.
And you don't celebrate on the way to the veterinarian's office.
It's like, Oh yeah, here we are.
We're going to go euthanize a dog.
It's like, you do it because you're a grownup and you're responsible and you want to care for your community and not have other communities made vulnerable by something that's harmful.
I've really been thinking about something you've said about this, and that is that the statue was alive from the beginning.
And I think that has helped me think about the kinds of ideas you just presented, because I think oftentimes, my students especially, when we talk about myth, if I'm in a religious studies class and I introduce the idea of a myth, I think my students are really able to glom onto the idea of, well, a myth is a story and some stories are quote-unquote true, some stories are quote-unquote false, right?
And, you know, a myth might be a story that teaches a lesson or might have a moral or a sense of identity for people, whatever.
Here's my point.
We're often willing to engage in the veracity of stories, of narratives.
We don't often think of monuments as storytelling objects.
By the very existence of the Robert E. Lee statue, you're saying there is a story in which Robert E. Lee is someone to venerate.
So if you put up a statue, you're telling a story of veneration for this man.
And what I take from you is the veneration We are making a moral decision to say as a community, we should have never venerated this man in this public way, and therefore, the decision to melt down the statue is not one of glee.
It is not, as some of the white supremacists on Twitter said, the sign of, we want white people to be extinct, right?
It is a It is a storytelling act.
It is saying that we are telling a story of our public space that does not venerate this person and his leadership for this cause.
But in fact, and I want to ask you about this, we will venerate others through public art in other forms.
I'm wondering if you can talk about that, this idea of a monument as a lie, a white supremacist lie, but then also what it means for the plans to use the metal from the statue to create different forms of public art in the future.
Yeah.
Well, first I want to say a little bit about myth.
I mean, which in kind of in common parlance is often used to mean fable, a false story, this sort of thing.
As religious studies scholars, we, the way that we talk about myth, not on, you know, kind of folklore scholars or literature scholars and stuff too.
You can call on like Bruce Lincoln, a religious studies scholar at the University of Chicago, I think if he's still there, talked about myth as Ideology and narrative form, I think, is what he said.
So it kind of just kind of recognizes, you know, there are a lot of myths that circulate that have uh more or less kind of support let's put it kind of structural this sort of thing than others right and in the case of the being in the southern united states where the lost cause uh uh version of interpretation of the civil war was kind of the preferred
interpretive frame for white southerners for decades and decades over a century.
And so this myth of Robert E. Lee was this fine Christian soldier and on, you know, and all these sorts of, you know, is something that is expressed in that.
And then you have this object, again, physical object that takes up space, that is in a central place in the community where you, you know, pass by on your way to celebrations and this sort of thing.
It's in a park that kind of extols this interpretation of the war, which is very damaging, that dehumanizes in its minimizing of the trauma and suffering of enslaved people.
And, And instead, elevating about that, this notion that Lee was a fine Christian and the war You know, it wasn't about slavery and besides slavery wasn't that is the definition of white supremacy.
When black suffering...
It's down here and white, you know, kind of sense of pride in a system that actively suppresses.
That's what white supremacy is.
Yes.
It doesn't need to be torches marching through your university, you know, guys with Nazi flags, you know, down your street.
And it's told in a very pretty, pretty narrative that is wrapped up in a work of art that, again, is in a public place.
So yours and my tax dollars are supporting that thing.
Whenever it would get tagged with graffiti within a couple hours, the city staff would be there immediately power washing it off.
You know, and we would, you know, it's like, isn't that something?
Look at the values.
It was like, can you do that with affordable housing?
It's just going to say like budgets, budgets are moral, are set of moral choices.
So we're saying we have the power to show up and within a couple hours to Yeah.
to clean the statue, but hey, can we help those suffering from being unhoused?
Those who- And there were literally in what was formerly Lee Park and actually even still today, a homeless encampment of folks that are there.
So it's like, well, you calling this guy like, oh, emergency, come spray, clean the statue, clean the graffiti off the statue.
Now it's like, why don't you take that energy?
And so this is what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about moral choices.
Where are we going to expend our energy, our time, our staff resources, our money, that sort of thing.
It's, it's, it's an issue.
And, and then there's moral risks.
In anything, like I said, there's even there are more in whatever you do, including melting down.
That that has its own.
Like I said, if you're spending money on that, you're not spending it on something else.
And it's quite an ambitious proposal that we have, you know, to take the materials of a harmful statue and make them available to an artist to create a work of art that expresses our community's value, you know, about a 21st century multiracial democracy.
What would that look like in terms of art, rather than a white supremacist 19th century society?
You know, slaveholding society.
We want better art.
We deserve better art.
Well, and our public art, I think, reflects the stories we tell about ourselves.
You just talked about, right, a myth as ideology and narrative form.
We can think about these memorials as the values of our communities in statue form, in memorial form.
So if we're going to have a multiracial democracy where all experience equality and representation and inclusion, then The things that represent us in public, our public space is not neutral.
We have to imbue that space with the values we purport to hold.
And so you can see why this is so important.
I want to just, you've taken us through the very painful history that starts in 2016 and ends and brings us till today.
You've talked about the legal fights, you've talked about walking by the Neo-Confederates with guns, talked about the trauma that many experienced as a result of these events.
We're now in this moment after the statue's been melted down.
I'm wondering what you did make, along with dozens of others, the moral choice and took the moral risk to melt down.
As we close today, would you just reflect on what that might mean in other cases around the country, whether that is in the South, whether that is in the Pacific Northwest or anywhere else in the United States?
What does making that choice perhaps signal to anyone who is looking?
Well, I mean, part of what we were doing, we being organizers around the Swords into Plowshares project, was that we wanted to present another option.
We wanted to broaden the range of potential actions that communities can take when they are confronting these material objects.
That represents such harmful narratives, you know what I mean?
The range of options had heretofore been you leave it there, you just leave the statue there.
Or maybe you add a mealy mouth plant with a bunch of caveats about how we don't believe this anymore and it doesn't really interrupt the visual plane of a huge monument.
Or you remove it and put it in storage and it just sits there in a state of moral stasis.
Or you ship it down the road to some, or, you know, you put it, put it in a museum.
Boy, I hope they, hope they do responsible curation.
Hope that the next curator that comes in, uh, kind of keeps with the critical, uh, stance toward it.
That can change too.
Boards of directors change, priority, you know, right?
Go in storage, is it go to a battlefield?
Same, same kinds of things.
And we wanted to broaden that range of options just to include destruction.
And we're not saying that every community should do this with every statue that is removed, and we're not even saying that every statue should be.
I mean, it's like different communities have to make those decisions, informed decisions, you know, historically informed decisions, because that's the thing.
There's a lot of kind of very slipshod thinking going on about, oh, like erasing history.
It's like, oh, if you don't have this statue, then we'll somehow not.
It's like, oh, we're never going to forget General Lee.
Trust.
But we're reframing it, is what we're doing.
So we wanted to have this be kind of another option that's out there for communities to consider.
You know, and I think a lot of people were shocked, but all those that kind of did approve, I thought, wow, any community should melt down a statue.
It should be Charlottesville melting down the Robert E. Lee statue.
You know, of all places.
So there was kind of a nod of sympathy, even from people that might otherwise not approve of such an iconoclastic act.
So it's another option that's out there and other communities can consider that also by kind of moving the Overton window, as it were, to include destruction or we prefer transformation because we're still going to have the materials.
That's the thing.
It's not going away.
We're not erasing history.
We're transforming it.
And when, in the end, this new work of art is installed, we'll make sure that that will be part of the narrative of it.
The materials for this statue were taken from a statue that had been here for 90-some years, and this will all be explained.
We're kind of expunging this.
That's right.
We're taking control of the narrative and telling the story about ourselves and our nation and our community that we want to tell.
You know what I mean?
So it's about having more options available.
And by moving the Overton window over just a little further, it's like, ooh, look at what Charlottesville did.
Maybe it makes things on the other side, like just plain removal.
Maybe it makes it just a little bit easier to kind of, I mean, and some city councils and other were kind of making, when there were just kind of repeated incidents of tagging of statues and this sort of thing, or chipping away at some so-called vandalism, that some elected officials who didn't want to expend too much political capital on it, I mean, they kind of privately didn't like the statue, would prefer that it be gone.
Didn't want to make it into an election year issue, this sort of thing.
With those kind of extra legal options that, you know, that some activists were using, I call them aerosol artists, that it became easier for elected officials to say, oh well, we need to, for its own protection, we need to move it out, you know, the public park, and we'll put it in storage, and then it kind of Gets forgotten or this sort of thing.
But you know, there, there were just kind of, it has been in the last four or five years or so, just kind of more movement and thinking about how different communities want public space to look like and, and, you know, and what to do.
And so, you know, wanted to, this is what we wanted to do.
This is what our community decided to do.
We, like I said, we were sued soon as we filed that.
You know, submitted that application to city council when Swords into Plowshares was submitted in October of 2021.
It was castigated by some, by kind of the usual suspects, neoconfederates and such.
And then when the city council voted unanimously, it should be said, in December of 21 to approve giving the Lee statue, the city's Lee statue away, transferring ownership to the Jefferson School African-American Heritage Center for the express purpose of melting it down.
Never is not some sneaky plan or something.
It was very publicly stated, this is what we're doing.
And our duly elected officials and community members said, yes, this is what we want.
And anyone else, our detractors, they themselves could have submitted a proposal.
Again, the problem is it's a physical object that exists in the world.
It's taking up space.
So if you have a better plan, of what you think could be done with this object.
Please submit an application to City Council, and very few people did.
You know, and it turns out that of the very few applications that came in, the city council looked at all the options and said, oh, this one is the most extensive.
This is an organization, the Jefferson School African-American Heritage Center, that is a local nonprofit that we trust.
And the offer they're putting forward here is cogent and good.
And, you know, and it was good.
We did this all above board.
Yeah.
This was all legal and then we were sued and we went through two years of court decisions, which ended finally on September the 26th, 2023, when the judge came back and we were greenlighted.
You know, we went through all the channels.
You know, we got the law changed, got it removed, put in an application for swords and plowshares to take possession of this, to melt it down, and that's what we've done.
And so other communities, they're going to have to decide on their own processes, and hopefully that they will be well informed, that they'll do the nitty-gritty historical work.
Because I guarantee you, once you kind of start scratching in the archives a little bit about whatever your statue is, wherever you are in the country, about what the historical context was of when it was installed, who was behind it, what they said at the installation ceremonies, those are real doozies.
Let me tell you, go and look at those speeches and some of the most ranked Racist thinking was on display by some of the speakers at these installation ceremonies.
I just encourage other communities to do that.
We went through a six-year process.
This didn't just emerge overnight.
Swords into plowshares.
This is the product of hundreds of hours of community organizing, meeting, hearings, all sorts of actions in the courts, in city council, in the state legislature.
Yeah.
It's hundreds of hours of work to have arrived at this place.
And I encourage other local communities to undertake a process like this.
Do that deep dive in the archives.
Find some college students or something.
People make their history project about it.
Do that deep dive.
Find out about it.
Start rattling some cages and decide to think really deliberately about how you want public space to look.
And what would it mean to have public space express democratic values?
That part is something I just, for those of you listening, I want to close with that because it You talked about the story, you talked about transforming the story, and I just want to reiterate that what you talked about is a statue that represents and tells the ideology and narrative of a 19th century slaveholding society.
By melting the statue and transforming it, you're telling a story Of who we think we want to be now.
We want to be a multiracial, pluralist democracy based on inclusion and equality for all people.
So melting the statue and transforming it is not about erasing history.
History and the myth or story of who we are are different.
History, as you said, we will remember and chronicle.
And this is not about expunging Lee from the historical record.
This is about transforming the story that we are going to tell about our communities, about ourselves, about our nation, and doing so by transforming what is represented in the public square.
That to me is the inspiration.
And I will just say, friends, if you're not inspired to be a historian now and Dr. Schmidt's absolute just inspiring work, then you should think about switching majors or going back to graduate school to do that.
I've taken up a bunch of your day already.
Friends, if you'd like to stay connected to what's happening with this story, you should go to the Swords & Plowshares website and make sure to stay connected there.
But Dr. Schmidt, what are other avenues?
That's sipcville.com.
That's S-I-P-C-V-I-L-E dot com.
Okay.
Are there other ways to stay abreast of what's happening?
Yeah, that's probably the best.
We update there with news stories about us and of course there's a donation link there as well if you'd like to support us that way and just kind of look at the work that we're doing and think about how you might do something similar in your own community.
I love, so I'm just going to give you one anecdote.
I, a Japanese American and have thousands of pages of reading, just it's not my academic specialty about Japanese internment, et cetera.
And one of the biggest proponents in California is Earl Warren.
And if you walk out of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, San Francisco being one of the centers of Asian American history, right next to the Asian Art Museum is the Earl Warren building.
And every time I see it, I just like seethe with anger.
Because unless you do that public history, you have no idea that this man, who was one of the biggest proponents of putting Japanese folks, Japanese American folks in camp, has his name right next to the Asian Art Museum, et cetera.
Anyway, so it's just one example of what you were talking about.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right, friends.
Thank you for being here.
As always, find us at Straight White JC.
Find all the information about our show and what we do in the show notes.
