Richmond’s Last Confederate Statue Is Removed

The last Confederate statue in Richmond, Va., was removed on Monday, and the remains beneath it of Ambrose P. Hill, the Confederate lieutenant general who was memorialized, were set to be transferred to a cemetery, an official said.

Local news channels broadcast the removal of the statue, which had stood on a pedestal at the busy intersection in Richmond, a city of 230,000, since 1892. The arm of a giant crane swung over the monument and plucked the statue before pivoting and depositing it onto a flatbed truck.

A small crowd watched the removal of the statue, Robert Steidel, the deputy chief administrative officer of operations for the City of Richmond, said in a telephone interview on Monday.

“The City Council has decided that the statue is going to go to the Black History Museum,” Mr. Steidel said. Officials at the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia could not be reached on Monday.

Mr. Steidel said that the Hill statue had been “stored and archived pending transfer” to the museum.

Mayor Levar M. Stoney said on Monday that the removal of the final Confederate statue marked the end of a period that he has denounced as the Lost Cause, referring to the movement after the Civil War by former Confederates to justify the Confederacy.

“Over two years ago, Richmond was home to more confederate statues than any city in the United States,” Mayor Stoney said in a statement on Twitter after the statue was gone. “Collectively, we have closed that chapter. We now continue the work of being a more inclusive and welcoming place where ALL belong.”

Like other American cities, Richmond, which was the capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War, has worked to undo the symbols and monuments of its Confederate history. George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in May 2020 and nationwide protests over systemic racism and police violence against Black people brought a surge of attention to Confederate monuments in cities across the nation.

Richmond has since removed about a dozen statues and other memorials, from cannons and highway markers to statues of the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, and the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Hill, a lieutenant general under Lee, served in the Army of Northern Virginia. He was killed outside of Petersburg, Va., a week before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in 1865.

The removal followed a series of court rulings, in which the indirect descendants of Hill opposed the city’s plans to take the statue down. The two sides agreed that the general’s remains should be interred in a cemetery in Culpeper, Va., but the indirect descendants wanted a say on where the statue would go, hoping to move it to Cedar Mountain Battlefield nearby.

In October, Judge D. Eugene Cheek Sr., of the Circuit Court of the City of Richmond, noted that Richmond’s City Council had adopted an ordinance in 2020 authorizing the city to remove Confederate statues on city-owned property. He said that the city had the right to dismantle the Hill statue and donate it to the museum. The general’s remains would also be reburied at a cemetery in Culpeper, about 85 miles north, Judge Cheek ruled in October.

Last week, the indirect descendants asked Judge Cheek to delay the removal of the Hill monument pending their appeal. It was mistakenly directed to the Supreme Court of Virginia instead of to the Virginia Court of Appeals, the Richmond Times Dispatch cited court documents as showing. On Thursday, Judge Cheek denied the motion, according to a court document, allowing the statue to be disassembled, Mr. Steidel said in the telephone interview.

S. Braxton Puryear, a lawyer for the distant relatives, did not immediately respond to a telephone message on Monday.