Charlottesville, Virginia's cancellation of history and art continued Saturday with an emergency meeting to bring down a statue featuring explorers Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Sacagawea.
The Charlottesville City Council voted unanimously in a meeting hastily called on 20 minutes notice to take down the explorers after toppling statues of confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson on Saturday.
"I feel that it should just be melted down," a Sacagawea descendant Rose Ann Abrahamson said during the council meeting, The Daily Progress reported. “I feel that it's entirely offensive and it should be obliterated."
Sacagawea was a 16-year-old native American girl who helped Lewis and Clark explore the Louisiana Territory as guide and interpreter. She was a symbol of women's worth and independence for the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
But activists did not like her posture as a tracker in the statue, thinking it made a woman appear subservient.
Workers who toppled the Lee and Jackson equestrian statues earlier Saturday brought down Lewis-Clark-Sacagawea with ropes, a crane, and pry bars. It had stood since 1919.
"Getting right down to business, not even taking the cherry picker off the truck," local observer Molly Conger tweeted.
According to President Donald Trump at Mount Rushmore in 2020, "Those who seek to erase our heritage want Americans to forget our pride and our great dignity, so that we can no longer understand ourselves or America's destiny."
Lewis, sent by President Thomas Jefferson to explore land west of the Mississippi in 1804, was born in Charlottesville’s Albemarle County.
Charlottesville's Lewis and Clark Exploratory Center has offered to take the statue.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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