The Boston firm Model of Architecture Serving Society got the nod Friday to create a monument to racial diversity in Charlottesville out of the bronze from a melted-down statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that once sparked a violent white supremacist rally.
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The firm, known as MASS, also designed the national memorial to lynched Black Americans in Montgomery, Alabama, as well as “The Embrace,” a public sculpture in Boston that depicts the intertwined arms of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and wife Coretta Scott King.
Charlottesville’s Jefferson School African American Heritage Center announced the choice Friday night after a months-long design competition. MASS was among three finalists from dozens of proposals submitted. The initial MASS concept would turn the raw bronze from the melted Lee statue into the stylized form of an African baobab tree as the centerpiece of a public area for contemplation and discussion.
That design — called “Rooted” — could change over the summer, organizers said, after what is envisioned as an intensive period of public review and discussions.
“The people of Charlottesville are going to create something that then will be gifted into that civic space, which right away is antithetical to how those Confederate monuments were placed,” said Andrea Douglas, executive director of the heritage center and co-founder of the Swords Into Plowshares project, which is spearheading the monument.
Instead of a statue to an individual placed by one segment of society, Douglas said, the new monument will be a multiracial effort to create “a space of remembrance and also a space of reckoning.”
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The Lee statue had stood in Charlottesville’s Market Street Park for nearly a century when the City Council voted in early 2017 to remove it. Later that year, white supremacists converged on the city to defend the statue in a violent Unite the Right rally. A counterprotester, Heather Heyer, was run down and killed by a car driven by one of the white supremacists.
The statue finally came down in 2021, and Swords Into Plowshares melted it into bronze ingots two years later.
“To transform the very material of a monument is to acknowledge that history cannot be erased, but it can be reimagined,” Jha D Amazi of MASS said in a written statement. “We are honored to contribute to a future shaped not by inherited symbols, but by shared values and collective imagination.”
The firm will work with sculptor Dana King on the main design. Organizers hope to have the new monument in place by August 2027 to mark 10 years since Unite the Right.
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