Confederate statues removed in Charlottesville — four years after deadly rally

Charlottesville, Va. removed statues of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson on Saturday, four years after the bronzes sparked a deadly riot and heated national debate over historic monuments and America’s past.

A small crowd of activists cheered briefly as city workers used a crane to hoist the century-old statue of Lee onto a waiting flatbed truck, where it was hauled off to a storage facility until the city council decides its ultimate fate. “We are taking down a traitor (read confederate f-boi) and his horse,” Zyahna Bryant, the teen activist whose online petition sparked the removal effort in 2016, tweeted Saturday morning.