The ruling is the latest turn in a long-running battle over the statues of the Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which has included a flurry of legal filings and a rally that rocked national politics.
Some, including the city of Charlottesville, which was sued after the City Council initially voted to remove the Lee statue, see the statues as monuments to racism. But others, including a group of citizens who filed the lawsuit six months before the 2017 rally, argue that they are Civil War memorials.
Judge Richard E. Moore of Charlottesville Circuit Court said in a letter dated April 25 that the statues can be viewed as both monuments to the war and as symbols of racism, but only because both sides in the case agree that they depict Confederate military leaders. That inherently makes them war memorials, he wrote.
“While some people obviously see Lee and Jackson as symbols of white supremacy, others see them as brilliant military tacticians or complex leaders in a difficult time,” the judge wrote. He added, “In either event, the statues to them under the undisputed facts of this case still are monuments and memorials to them, as veterans of the Civil War.”
The lawsuit named the city, the City Council and individual councilors. Neither lawyers for the plaintiffs nor for the defendants responded to messages seeking comment Tuesday night.
The white nationalist rally in August 2017 was organized to oppose a City Council vote to remove the statue of Lee. It resulted in the death of a counterprotester, and two state troopers were killed in a helicopter crash as they monitored the event.
The clash drew renewed attention to the presence of dozens of Confederate monuments across the country, many of which were taken down in the weeks and months that followed. But two years later, a legal debate continues in Charlottesville about whether the statues that incited the movement are actually monuments to the Confederacy.
That question is central to whether the city has the authority to remove them, said Richard Schragger, a law professor at the University of Virginia who has followed the case.
Under a 1904 state law that was amended in 1997 to apply to cities, local governments have the authority to authorize the building of war memorials, but they are forbidden from removing, damaging or defacing them. That power rests with the state government.
The City Council was sued in March 2017 by a group of citizens who said councilors had acted unlawfully when they voted a month earlier to move the Lee statue, even though the statues — which were briefly covered with plastic sheets — were never actually moved. (After the rally, the council voted to also remove the statue of Jackson. The lawsuit was then amended to include both statues.)
Bob Fenwick, a former council member who is named in the case, told a local CBS affiliate Monday that he remained “very comfortable” with his votes to remove the statues.
“It’s based on a flawed law, so the law doesn’t make much difference; it was a public process, it was a lawful process, so that’s our case,” he said.
The city argued in a court filing in January that the law did not apply to these statues because they were not really war memorials. It said the statues were instead symbols of white dominance erected during the Jim Crow era to promote a romantic vision of the antebellum South.
“The statues were part of a regime of city-sanctioned segregation that denied African-Americans equal access to government and public spaces,” attorneys for the city wrote. “The fact that certain Charlottesville residents are unaware of the statues’ history does not change that history or the messages the statues send.”
In his ruling, Moore said the motive of the people who erected the statues “does not change what they are.”
Schragger said that the judge’s ruling “didn’t come as a surprise to anyone” and that the case was widely expected to eventually head to the state’s Supreme Court. But before that can happen, the judge must rule on a few more elements of the case, he said.
One remaining question is whether prohibiting the removal of the statues violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Virginia and U.S. Constitutions, he said. Another is whether elected city councilors can be sued for votes they cast while in office. That could be a problem for the defendants if a judge decides to award the plaintiffs damages, like the cost of their legal fees.
“I think it is somewhat troubling to hold individual city councilors personally liable for votes that they take as members of a public body,” Schragger said.
Moore said in his ruling that he would address those arguments in the coming days and weeks. A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday, which Moore said he would use “for the announcing of any rulings or a status update on them.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.