Right Now, Dallas Is Showing Us How Not to Remove a Confederate Statue

Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee still hasn't surrendered his pedestal in Dallas - at least as of the time of this writing Friday.It's not like Lee's Brobdingnagian bronze statue is putting up a fight to stay in Oak Lawn, where it was strapped down 81 years ago.It's just that, ahem, Dallas city officials had no clue how complicated it would be to delicately detach a six-ton, 14-foot-tall statue and safely lift it with a crane from its rose-granite base before hauling it 15 miles to a storage facility.All this, mind you, was expected to be done on a moment's notice without damaging the memorial or harming anyone involved, including onlookers."It's complicated, and we don't have the original drawings," said David Fisher, assistant director of the Office of Cultural Affairs, the city agency herding the up-to-$450,000 project to remove, relocate and store the monument. "We didn't know exactly how the sculpture was attached to the base and we had to do some investigation into it."  Continue reading...