The Women Who Melted the Lee Statue

Straight White American Jesus

Axis Mundi Media: Bradley Onishi + Daniel Miller

News, Politics

4.7 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 14 November 2023

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The massive bronze sculpture of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, in uniform, astride his horse Traveller, stood in a downtown Charlottesville park for nearly a century. It was at the center of a deadly white nationalist rally in 2017, when Neo-Nazis and white supremacists tried to stop the city's plans to remove the statue. It came down to cheers in July of 2021. Dr. Jalane Schmidt has been part of the group of activists, scholars, and historians fighting not only to have the statue removed, but to doing something transformative and radical with it - melt it down. In this interview, she discusses the long legal battles to arrive at this moment, the ways armed Neo-Conferederates terrorized the public space surrounding the monument for years, and why melting it down was a moral risk worth taking. Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/ Swords Into Plowshares: https://sipcville.com/ Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/27/opinion/robert-e-lee-confederate-statues.html?unlocked_article_code=1.50w.uLKA.JKzWJ5zpFwGI&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare Gift link Washington Post article which includes exclusive video footage of the Lee statue meltdown, as well as an interview with me in which I discuss “moral risk” of iconoclasm: https://wapo.st/3QGfJVp https://www.npr.org/2023/10/26/1208603609/confederate-general-robert-e-lee-monument-melted-down-charlottesville-virginia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene denounced Swords Into Plowshares from the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives: https://x.com/chelliepingree/status/1720233516435120373?s=46&t=DFpnhdJ2ioBJpzPu9Ngbxw Subscribe now to American Idols: https://www.axismundi.us/american-idols/ To Donate: venmo - @straightwhitejc Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/BradleyOnishi Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC SWAJ Book Recommendations - September 2023: https://bookshop.org/lists/swaj-recommends-september-2023/edit Order Brad's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Axis Mundi. The Welcome to Straightwide American Jesus. My name is Brad O'Nishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
0:34.8	I'm joined today just by an incredible guest and that is Dr. Jellane Schmidt. So Dr. Schmidt,
0:40.4	I'm going to tell people all about you in a second, but first I just want to say, thanks for taking the time to do this.
0:45.0	Sure, thanks for having me, Brett.
0:47.0	So, Dr. Jeline Schmidt, director of the University of Virginia Karsh Institute of Democracy's Memory Project and an Associate Professor of Religious Studies there at UVA is somebody
0:58.0	who has a long and accomplished scholarly life, but has spent the last few years deeply involved in a project called
1:07.6	Swords into plowshares, along with several others as part of the steering committee of that project and it's an initiative to melt down
1:14.4	Charlottesville's Robert E. Lee statue to create new public art. There's a documentary or a short film called
1:20.7	unveiling the origin of Charlottesville Monuments and streaming on PBS now.
1:26.6	And we're here to talk because the monument was melted down just a bit ago and I want to talk
1:32.3	about that and other things with you. I want to start with just a little bit of history.
1:37.4	This movement to remove the Lee statue started about seven years ago. If I'm not, with a high school student named Anna Bryant who started a petition to have the memorial room or the stature removed.
1:50.0	It grew into one of the most infamous episodes in the Trump presidency because the decision to remove the statue
1:58.1	ignited and led to the Unite the Right rally that is where Heather Hire lost her life and it is where in the wake of it
2:07.0	Trump said there were fine people on both sides. I think as I say that people can
2:11.1	remember those episodes painfully and with remorse and not
2:14.8	really wanting to you have been on the ground that entire period what
2:19.8	happened after the Charlottesville United Right rally and today to get us to the point
2:25.6	where the Lee statue has been melted down.
2:28.8	Yeah, well that's a nice encapsulation.
2:30.8	I would say, yeah, in 2016, Siona Bryan's petition was brought to the public and then to
2:35.6	City Council and then we had a series of meetings to discuss how community members felt
	...

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