The Robert E. Lee equestrian statue had stood in what Charlottesville called Lee Park for decades — until the city renamed it Emancipation Park in 2017, then Market Street Park in 2018, while the legal fight over the statue itself ground on. On July 10, 2021, the statue came down. The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center took the bronze and, through a project called Swords Into Plowshares, melted it into new work in 2023. A few blocks away, a street sign marks where Heather Heyer was killed on August 12, 2017 — Fourth Street between Market and Water, renamed Heather Heyer Way that December. The community has kept its own memorial there: flowers, chalk, gatherings every August 12. What the city is left with are the parks themselves, the renamed streets, the empty pedestals — ground that had to be fought over before anyone could decide what it was actually for.
