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Cities didn’t have to wait for last year’s new state law to take down old Confederate monuments, the state Supreme Court said Thursday.
In Norfolk, Portsmouth and Virginia Beach — where monuments were removed last summer — the ruling doesn’t change anything. But it will allow Charlottesville to take down two monuments the city has fought to remove since 2017.
The court agreed with what Norfolk’s top prosecutor, the state’s attorney general and others have argued: that a 1997 law limiting the removal of Confederate monuments in cities doesn’t apply to statues erected before then.
Before 1997, the law applied only to counties.
“It is plainly evident that the statute does not express an intention that it be applied retroactively to monuments and memorials,” the court said in its unanimous opinion.
Charlottesville has fought to remove statues honoring Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson since 2017, a decision that was immediately challenged based on the 1997 law. The city was blocked from removing the statutes but covered them with black tarps after the “Unite the Right” white nationalist rally that left one woman dead after a man drove his car through a group of protestors.
There were calls to remove the statutes in Hampton Roads even before then, but the rally in Charlottesville was a turning point that prompted the Norfolk and Portsmouth councils to say they would remove the monuments. The statues were still standing last summer, though, with city leaders citing the Charlottesville court battle for their delay.
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Activists renewed calls for the statutes to come down last summer in the wake of national protests against police brutality and systemic racism.
Norfolk planned to remove its 80-foot downtown statue last year after July 1, when a new statute went into effect making the debate over the 1997 law moot. But the city ended up removing the 2,000-pound, 16-foot-tall obelisk earlier than planned after protestors in Portsmouth beheaded the Confederate statue and a piece fell on a man in the crowd, critically injuring him.
“Our city cannot ensure the safety of people and property if there is an attempt to pull down this statue,” Norfolk Mayor Kenny Alexander said in June.
The Portsmouth and Virginia Beach monuments came down after the July 1 law was in effect.
The Virginia Beach City Council voted in July to take down its monument, which stood outside the old Princess Anne County Courthouse in the same place where slave auctions were once held. Portsmouth’s City Council voted in July to remove its monument, which had been heavily damaged in the June protests, and it came down a month later.
The Newport News City Council voted in August to remove the Confederate monument that stood outside the historic Warwick County courthouse in Denbigh. The monument was put in storage after its removal in September because no one expressed interest in it.
Sara Gregory, 757-469-7484, sara.gregory@pilotonline.com