Norfolk’s Confederate monument could be removed as soon as August

Norfolk — Norfolk’s City Council has said for nearly three years that it plans to move the monument to Confederate war dead that stands prominently downtown.

Now, there’s a timeline.

Depending on how quickly they can navigate legal requirements, the 80-foot marble and bronze monument could be moved as early as Aug. 7.

At Tuesday’s City Council meeting, City Attorney Bernard Pishko laid out the steps the city will have to follow starting July 1. That’s when the new laws go into effect that clear legal hurdles the city has said prevented them from moving forward — even though the state attorney general told Norfolk it could move its monument back in October.

[ Previous coverage: Norfolk can move Confederate monument, Virginia attorney general says ]

Under the new law, the city has to schedule a public hearing on the removal of the monument. That’s planned now for the council’s July 7 meeting.

Once the public hearing is complete, there’s a 30-day waiting period during which the city has to hear offers from museums, battlefields or other groups that may want to take the monument.

Pishko said the city isn’t obligated to take anybody up on their offer to take it. After 30 days, the city can move the monument.

With a July 7 public hearing, that would mean the city could start removal efforts on Aug. 7.

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The plan still seems to be to take the monument from its place at Main Street and Commercial Place and move it to Elmwood Cemetery, a mile and a half away.

The monument has been the target of activists seeking its removal for several years, and has been graffitied three times in the last four days with “Black Lives Matter” messages and anti-police slogans as protests over police brutality have continued in Norfolk and around the country.

The Downtown Norfolk Council, a business organization tasked with keeping downtown clean, said this week it will no longer clean the monument, leaving that to the city. The group’s spokeswoman also called for its swift removal.

The monument, built between 1899 and 1907 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and now owned by the city, is built at the site of a former slave market and was part of a wave of monuments erected decades after the end of the Civil War that historians say was mean to to, in part, reassert white supremacy.

In 2015, Norfolk’s City Council rejected requests from a civil rights group to remove it. However, mounting community pressure following 2017′s deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville prompted the council to reverse course and vote to move it to Elmwood Cemetery.

Since then, the city has said legal hangups have prevented it from moving forward with removal.

Ryan Murphy, 757-739-8582, ryan.murphy@pilotonline.com