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Zack Wajsgras/The Daily Progress, via Associated Press
The black shrouds that for six months have covered two Confederate statues in Charlottesville, Va., the site of a deadly white nationalist rally last summer, must come down, a Virginia judge declared on Tuesday.
The City of Charlottesville has 15 days to remove the tarps over the statues of Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which were shielded from the public’s view shortly after violent clashes between white nationalists and counterprotesters last August. City officials said at the time that they were covered for a period of mourning, but the judge said on Tuesday that Charlottesville did not appear to have any intention of removing them.
“It is not a matter of the ‘mourning’ having gone on too long,” the judge, Richard E. Moore of Charlottesville Circuit Court, wrote in his ruling, noting that visitors and historians have been unable to view the monuments for months. “Their lost opportunity cannot be undone.”
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Steve Helber/Associated Press
A city spokesman said that it would comply with the judge’s order but added that no specific date had been set for the removal of the tarps. The spokesman, Brian Wheeler, said that police officers were patrolling the monuments on Tuesday evening in case people tried to remove the shrouds on their own.
The judge’s order was a small but significant development in a nearly yearlong legal battle over the future of the two statues, which were erected in separate public parks in the center of Charlottesville in the early 1900s. Months before the white nationalist rally, the City Council voted to remove the Lee statue, as well as to redesign and rename the park with the Jackson monument. That decision led several groups, including the Virginia Division of Sons of Confederate Veterans, to sue the city last March to block those efforts.
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