Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam and Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney have endorsed a plan to desecrate a Confederate general’s grave, topple the bronze statue above it, and remove the memorial’s stone pedestal, National File reported.
Democrat officials for years have sought methods to eliminate memorials and statues of historical figures who offend their Marxist worldview, they but they often lacked the authority.
Richmond officials found a way to indulge their iconoclastic fantasies.
The Richmond Commission of Architectural Review has declared that General Ambrose Powell Hill’s statue threatens traffic safety and thus must be removed for a supposedly non-partisan reason.
The city still has to approve the final removal arrangements, but there currently is not a plan in place for relocating Hill’s coffin and remains.
It is expected that the city will approve the removal.
“I think we have drawn this out as long as we can and longer than it should have been,” City Councilman Mike Jones said about Hill’s disinterment. “I know that so many Richmonders are just ready for this saga to be over so we can put a pin in this portion of our painful past.”
Jones called the memorial a “painful trinket of white supremacy.”
Richmond and the Hill Monument Association erected the statue and buried Hill at the sight in 1892 at the cost of $15,000—more than $440,000 today.
Barry Isenhour, who speaks on behalf of the Virginia Flaggers, a Confederate history defense group, called the city’s leaders “degenerates,” who have caved to “social justice terrorists” and plan to “desecrate the grave of a war veteran.”
Hill opposed slavery and never owned slaves, but he vigorously supported Virginia’s independence from the Union and attachment to the Confederacy.
