The final scene of a five-year saga that began with a high-school student circulating a petition, inspired an infamous white-nationalist demonstration, landed in the hands of lawyers and ultimately the Virginia Supreme Court, and has now ended with the statue being carted off to parts unknown unceremoniously on the back of a flatbed. A crowd was there to see it off this morning:

And there it goes: Charlottesville VA's Robert E. Lee statue has been removed. pic.twitter.com/qI4xhnIqJ3

— The Recount (@therecount) July 10, 2021

And Robert E. Lee is gone from Market Street Park in downtown Charlottesville. Now to Stonewall Jackson. pic.twitter.com/LIPjH6U8wW

— Allison Wrabel (@craftypanda) July 10, 2021

A nearby monument to Stonewall Jackson was also removed. The city was required by law to solicit offers from entities interested in taking the statues off its hands and reportedly received 10. I wonder if the eventual winning bidder is prepared to have the statues become a culture-war flashpoint in their new home, with all of the ugliness that might entail. “I’m really happy it’s a boring morning, and boring means that no bad things happened,” said a UVA professor present at the removal of the Lee monument to the Times, referring to the murder of Heather Heyer after the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally. “We were all nervous that more bad things could happen.”

Reaction on the scene afterward was what you’d expect, ranging from “this is great” to “this is erasing history” to “this doesn’t go nearly far enough”:

“It feels good. It’s been a long time coming,” said Zyahna Bryant, a University of Virginia student who was a ninth grader in Charlottesville when she started a petition in March 2016 calling on the city to remove the statue of Lee and to rename Lee Park, which is now called Market Street Park…

“The statues coming down is the tip of the iceberg,” Ms. Bryant said. “There are larger systems that need to be dismantled. Educational equity is a good place to start…

In Market Street Park, Cornelia Johnson, a Charlottesville resident who works as a church choir director and pianist, said she didn’t agree with those who consider the removal of the statues to be a “great achievement.”

“Taking a statue down is not going to make things better for people of color,” she said. “Taking a statue down is not going to change the way people act. Change has to come from within. And it doesn’t bother me one way or the other if they leave it up.”

A striking fact about the statues is their age. It’s widely assumed that most Confederate monuments were erected soon after the Civil War, to honor the south’s dead and glorify its heroes. But only a few were. The bulk went up between 1900 and 1920, when most Confederate veterans were elderly or dead and most southerners alive at the time were too young to remember the war. Many more monuments were raised after 1920 than before 1900 and they weren’t all located in the original 11 Confederate states either. The Lee and Jackson statues in Charlottesville are of that era, not of the immediate post-war period — the latter was dedicated in 1921 and the former in 1924, a few days after the Ku Klux Klan held a major rally at the site. That’s no coincidence, as that was the Klan’s heyday and the height of segregation and Jim Crow, when lynchings in the south were still common.

Point being, statues from that period weren’t erected to honor valor on the battlefield, they were put up as part of a wider cultural offensive to remind blacks that they were second-class citizens. That’s why a disproportionate number of CSA monuments across the south were dedicated at courthouses rather than at military installations or in parks, a strange trend if the point was to memorialize fallen soldiers but a rational one if the point was to communicate that the ruling legal regime endorsed the racial attitudes responsible for slavery. The monuments signaled to blacks that the Confederacy might be gone as a political institution but not as a cultural one. Toppling Lee from his pedestal in Charlottesville today is a way to countersignal that, at long last, it’s gone as a cultural institution too. It makes sense in that context that the white-nationalist droogs who marched with tiki torches in the city four years ago chanting “Jews will not replace us” saw the effort to remove the Lee statue as a special affront and a rallying point. It’s not because they cared about Confederate military valor or “erasing history” — there’s plenty of history they’d erase if given the opportunity — it’s because they recognized that the statue is a symbol of the racist hegemony they support, by design.

Was a symbol, I should say.

I’ll leave you with this, one last defeat for the general.

A friend was sitting on his porch in Charlottesville this morning and got to witness one final retreat pic.twitter.com/0y6HlaB8Oa

— Clyde McGrady (@CAMcGrady) July 10, 2021