Richmond removes its last public Confederate monument

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — The city of Richmond — the capital of the Confederacy for most of the Civil War — has removed its last public Confederate statue.

Richmond removed its other Confederate monuments amid the racial justice protests that followed George Floyd’s killing in 2020. But efforts to remove the statue of Confederate General A.P. Hill, which sits in the middle of a busy intersection near a school where traffic accidents are frequent, were more complicated because the general’s remains were interred beneath it.

It took just minutes to free the statue from the base Monday morning, before a crane using yellow straps looped under the statue's arms lifted it onto a bed of tires on a flatbed truck.

The statue will be given to the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia.

In September, attorneys for Hill’s indirect descendants agreed his remains would be moved to a cemetery in Culpeper, near where Hill was born. But the plaintiffs argued that the ownership of the statue should be transferred to them. They hoped to move it to a battlefield, also in Culpeper, according to news outlets.

In October, news outlets reported that Circuit Court Judge David Eugene Cheek Sr. ruled that city officials — not the descendants — get to decide where the statue goes next.