In the American Charlottesville, statues of Confederate generals were dismantled

The authorities of the American city of Charlottesville in Virginia have dismantled monuments to Confederate generals of the Civil War, whose activities are related to slavery.

We are talking about the statues of Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson – two of the most famous generals of the slave-owning South. The monuments were located in the parks of the city.

Information about the dismantling of monuments was published by the Twitter account of the Charlottesville government.

Last month, it was reported that the Charlottesville council unanimously supported the decision to remove monuments to Lee and Jackson from the parks.

In April, the Supreme Court of Virginia granted Charlottesville and any other locality in the state the opportunity to decide on the fate of monuments to Confederate figures.

Attempts to remove the statues sparked protests by the far-right and counter-protests by the left in 2017. There were clashes, one of the far-right drove a car into the crowd and killed a woman. The court subsequently refused to remove the statues, but the state Supreme Court overturned this decision.

In 2020, the spontaneous demolition of statues by a Confederate general by crowds of protesters took place in some cities and states amid protests and riots after the murder of an African-American George Floyd by police officers.

During the conflict between the North and the South of 1861-1865 based on slavery, part of the states broke away from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America (CSA). The military conflict ended with the victory of the North and the restoration of the United States to its former borders. Slaves were also freed, although the de facto position of African Americans remained unequal in many states until the 1960s. African Americans are the least socially and economically prosperous racial and ethnic group in American society. The police are accused of systemic racism, and some high-profile cases of murders of African-Americans by white police officers have led to large-scale protests in recent years.