With a yellow rope around his body and a giant crane standing by, a statue of a Confederate soldier in downtown Norfolk was lifted from its perch high above the city’s streets and carefully maneuvered down to the ground.
Early estimations were that the process would take several hours — but in the end, crews discovered just a single bolt holding down the bronze, hollow solider known as “Johnny Reb” who weighs about 2,000 pounds and stands about 16 feet tall. The rest of the 80-foot monument at Main Street and Commercial Place will be dismantled in coming weeks. The city plans to move the soldier to Elmwood Cemetery.
The monument was completed in 1907 and sits on a site that once housed the hub of Hampton Roads’ slave trade.
When the statue was down, a small smattering of people who had gathered to watch, some sticking it out in the pouring rain, put down their phones and cameras to clap.
It was about time, many said.
“It’s kind of like chess,” said Jonathan Ramirez, a Norfolk engineer and artist, who was out early on Main Street with his camera to capture the historic moment. “It’s the last piece on the board.”
A handful of Virginia’s Confederate statues in recent days have met their demise in city rivers, toppled over during demonstrations from Hampton Roads to Richmond. They’ve been spray painted with the words protesters have shouted since the death of George Floyd, a black man in Minneapolis who died a little more than two weeks ago after a white police officer knelt on his neck.
It stood in contrast to Norfolk’s decision to move it on an early morning.
In Portsmouth, protesters Wednesday night knocked off the heads and ripped out the weapons on the statues of Confederate soldiers on that city’s monument. The demonstration ended with one man getting seriously hurt after one of the statues fell on him.
That’s when city leaders in Norfolk gathered. They didn’t want anyone getting hurt near the downtown monument that has been a gathering spot for protesters recently. City Council has talked about removing it for years in the wake of other national protests.
Andre Case was watching with a neighbor as the statue was removed Friday. He’s a production planner for Newport News Shipbuilding and lives in the tall Icon building that sits near the Confederate monument, giving him a firsthand view of all that’s been going on there in the past week or so.
When he first moved in, he thought it was a statue of the American general Douglas MacArthur. He found out that wasn’t the case after going up to it and reading the inscription.
“The symbolism in general makes people feel bad,” Case said. He often sees teenagers skateboarding nearby and families walking around, knowing they have to explain who the Confederate soldier is and what he stands for.
As Case watched the crane crew remove the soldier, Old Dominion University history professor Annette Finley-Croswhite came over to have a look and take pictures. She said she couldn’t miss the moment.
The site was a former slave auction site, she pointed out, which Case wasn’t aware of. Before he worked in Newport News, Case was at another shipyard in Norfolk and he learned that a dock there was once a location where slaves were unloaded from ships.
Finley-Croswhite said she was in Portsmouth for the Wednesday demonstration around that Confederate monument. She remarked how she felt reassured seeing African American families taking photos in front of the monument as the demonstration went on.
It was a reclaiming of a spot, she said, but more than that, a reclaiming of democracy and a “potential expansion of democracy by people it had been denied to.”
At the Norfolk monument, she said she’s been waiting for so long for it to come down, calling it an affront to the idea of equality in the Constitution. She remembers as a young girl in school in order to get an “A” on a class paper, she had to write that the Civil War was about states’ rights, not, as she knew, slavery.
She has felt a bit skeptical about the recent protests and demonstrations in the wake of Floyd’s death and what will come from them. That was until yesterday. She could feel a turn toward a moment of change. Now, the following day, she was watching more history.
By 6:55 a.m. the soldier was off its perch. Minutes later it was down on the ground, delicately placed on the street.
Before it was lifted on to a flatbed truck to be taken to storage, the soldier laid flat on the ground. Above him, spray painted on the monument base read the words: “You lost. It’s over.”
Gordon Rago, 757-446-2601, gordon.rago@pilotonline.com