Shortly after 9 a.m. on Monday, June 8, several dozen men and women walked into The Haven, a nonprofit multi-resource day shelter and homeless support center in downtown Charlottesville. Sunlight streamed through the facility’s stained-glass windows, casting a warm glow as the center’s frequent guests greeted the staff, volunteers, and one another.
Once the guests were seated, all eyes turned to Andrea Douglas, the executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center (JSAAHC). She stood near the front of the historic Gothic-style building, facing rows of polished brown pews.
Douglas was there to speak to the gathered crowd about the shelter’s former neighbor: the towering statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that stood across the street in Market Street Park from 1924 until its removal in 2021.
Working toward a community-driven revisioning of public spaces
Douglas’ recent visit to The Haven was part of a months-long public outreach initiative designed to give Charlottesville-area residents — particularly members of the Black community and the city’s unhoused population — a voice in the future of the Lee monument.
When the Lee monument was removed, the city of Charlottesville gifted it to JSAAHC, which dismantled and melted the statue into bronze ingots that eventually became part of a massive “Monuments” exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Once the six-month exhibition ended in early May, Swords Into Plowshares, an organization that formed shortly after the 2021 removal of the city’s Confederate statues, revealed plans for the second phase of its “Recast/Reclaim” initiative…