Remembering Laurie

[David Lockmiller]

I thought of Laurie earlier this month when I made the following post:

Richmond’s Last Confederate Statue Is Removed

The last Confederate statue in Richmond, Va., was removed on Monday, and the remains beneath it of Ambrose P. Hill, the Confederate lieutenant general who was memorialized, were set to be transferred to a cemetery, an official said. Ambrose P. Hill, the Confederate lieutenant general served under the Confederate general Robert E. Lee in the Army of Northern Virginia. He was killed outside of Petersburg, Va., a week before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in 1865.

The removal followed a series of court rulings, in which the indirect descendants of Hill opposed the city’s plans to take the statue down. Near the end of the court proceedings, the two sides agreed that the general’s remains should be interred in a cemetery in Culpeper, Va., but the indirect descendants wanted a say on where the statue would go, hoping to move it to Cedar Mountain Battlefield nearby.

In October, Judge D. Eugene Cheek Sr., of the Circuit Court of the City of Richmond, said that the city had the right to dismantle the Hill statue and donate it to the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia. The City Council had decided that the statue is going to the Black History Museum.

I was wondering, if Laurie had been still alive, what Laurie would have done to stop this injustice and make certain that the statue of Confederate Lieutenant General Ambrose P. Hill would have been moved to Cedar Mountain Battlefield, as his indirect descendants wanted to do so.

History is being lost, unnecessarily.

Laurie was such a good person!