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.

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Charlottesville prevailed in a protracted legal battle with the Sons of Confederate Veterans and other groups, and donated the Lee statue to a coalition that proposed to melt it down and create a more inclusive public art installation.

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Lawsuits to stop the project failed, and last weekend organizers moved forward, with great secrecy, to disassemble and melt down the Lee monument.

The work is being done at an out-of-state foundry. NPR agreed not to reveal its location or the identity of the workers because they fear repercussions.

They use a torch to score the head of the statue, in the pattern of a death mask. Lee’s face falls to floor with a loud clank.

The symbolism is poignant for Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Cultural Center in Charlottesville, which is leading the project.

“The act of myth-making that has occurred around Robert E. Lee, removing his face is emblematic of the kind of removal of that kind of myth,” Douglas says.

The project is called Swords into Plowshares, taken from a Bible verse in the book of Isaiah.

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The melting down of the Lee statue will take weeks. It weighed nearly 10,000 pounds. Organizers say the next step will be choosing an artist who will craft the bronze ingots into a new art form to be displayed in Charlottesville.

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