White contractors wouldn’t remove Confederate statues. So a Black man did it.

Partly in reaction to the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, the General Assembly had passed a bill early in 2020 to allow localities to take down Confederate statues. So when Mercer called to pitch him on taking down a Confederate monument, Henry viewed it differently than he might have before. (Parker Michels-Boyce for The Washington Post)****There was, of course, one more Richmond statue to come down. As he thought about the significance of the Confederate statues, Henry decided he wanted to find a way to turn the destruction into something positive. It was the last major Confederate statue to be removed from the city.