From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

Today, in 2012, a woman raised her hand and asked if the city of Charlottesville, Virginia

should remove a statue of General Robert E. Lee from a downtown park. The chain of events that

led from that question to Saturday's violence. And racism is evil, the president says, two days after

the violence erupted in Charlottesville. It's Tuesday, August 15th.

My name is Kristen Seikas. I've been on the Charlottesville City Council for eight years.

I have lived in Charlottesville for 22 years and love my city.

When I moved here, our family noticed these two large Confederate statues in Charlottesville.

Robert E. Lee is by far the most dominant in a central park of our city,

overlooking the downtown, kind of in a high pride of place. And it was startling because

we had heard that Charlottesville was this wonderfully welcoming place. We had an interracial family.

And when we saw those statues, we wondered, you know, why is Charlottesville glorifying heroes

of the Confederacy if it really is a place that's interested in racial equity? And so in 2012,

when I was on city council, I went to a lecture of an historian.

In our time thinking about the south here, based in Virginia, one of the more monumentalized

places in America, I think it's fair to say. Talking about the kind of practice of putting up

these monuments to the Confederacy in early 1920s. We've seen lots of different kinds of monuments

to the past of all the humans that have enacted things here before us. And our challenge has been

to figure out what these are monuments to, but also what they say about the people who built them,

and also about what they're response to them says about us.

And that they were really part of the resurgence of this sort of myth of Southern white greatness.

When white people were in charge in the south and everything was wonderful and there was honor and

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