RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — The city of Richmond — the capital of the Confederacy for most of the Civil War — has removed its last public Confederate statue.
Richmond removed its other Confederate monuments amid the racial justice protests that followed George Floyd’s killing in 2020. But efforts to remove the statue of Confederate General A.P. Hill, which sits in the middle of a busy intersection near a school where traffic accidents are frequent, were more complicated because the general’s remains were interred beneath it.
It took just minutes to free the statue from the base Monday morning, before a crane using yellow straps looped under the statue’s arms lifted it onto a bed of tires on a flatbed truck.
The statue will be given to the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia.