Carol Gravitt, a Halifax resident, has sent a letter to all members of the Halifax County Board of Supervisors requesting they remove the statue and appoint a committee of appropriate stakeholders to determine a new appropriate home for or alternate disposition of the statue. Reports The Gazette Virginian
She plans to formally address the board when they meet in August.
As a 68-year-old, white, female retired attorney, Gravitt said in her letter to the board that she asks supervisors to “help make Halifax County actively anti-racist, beginning with the modest, but highly symbolic removal of a Confederate statue.”
The statue of the Confederate soldier has stood at the Halifax County Courthouse Square since the late 1930’s. The statue replaced the original statue of a Confederate private soldier that was approved by the county’s board of supervisors in 1910, which was felled by a tree during a windstorm.
Gravitt says the monument is a “painful reminder to the citizens of the United States and Halifax County of a dark period in our history and continued discrimination and mistreatment of African Americans.”
