The Confederate statue that sparked Unite the Right came down — but its future remains contested

The 26-foot bronze statue was dedicated in 1924 at a Confederate heritage event, where Lee was declared a "stainless leader of a stainless cause."

By this point, the so-called lost cause propaganda — a narrative that casts the Confederacy’s racist mission in a positive light — had taken hold across the South.

During the Civil War, 52% of the local population around Charlottesville was enslaved, says Jalane Schmidt, a professor at the University of Virginia who took part in the effort to remove the statue.

After the Civil War, Virginia passed a new constitution giving Black men the right to vote. Then 30 years later, white lawmakers reversed course by instituting poll taxes and literacy rules to disenfranchise most Black voters.

“Some of the former Confederates and certainly Confederate descendants and sympathizers called the Reconstruction-era constitution the ‘N-word Constitution,’” Schmidt says. “And we're getting rid of the N-word Constitution and negro rule, and now we're finally reasserting Virginia values.”

The first wave of Confederate statues to promote this idea went up in cemeteries but soon bled into public spaces. The first Confederate statue erected in downtown Charlottesville was installed in 1909 in front of the courthouse, Schmidt says.