A statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that was taken down by Dallas city officials four years ago has resurfaced — at a private Texas resort.
The massive bronze statue, which shows Lee on horseback with another mounted soldier, was removed by the city in 2017 amid the controversy following racial violence that erupted in Charlottesville, Va., earlier that year over the planned removal of another Lee monument.
In 2019, the Dallas statue was sold at an online auction for $1.44 million to the city-based law firm Holmes Firm PC — and is now on display at the 27,000-acre Lajitas Golf Resort in predominantly white Terlingua, Texas.
The club is owned by Dallas billionaire Kelcy Warren, co-founder of Energy Transfer Partners.
The resort’s manager, WSB Resorts and Clubs president Scott Beasley, called the bronze effigy “a fabulous piece of art.”
“I would say that of the 60-plus-thousand guests we host each year, we’ve had one or two negative comments,” Beasley told the Houston Chronicle.
The sculpture, made in 1935 by artist Alexander Phimister Proctor, sat in storage at Hensley Field, a former Dallas naval air station, until it was auctioned off.
Dallas Black Lives Matter activist Brandon Mack told the Associated Press he takes issue with the Lee statue being described as just a work of art.
“We don’t glorify the swastika,” he said. “We don’t have monuments [of] Adolf Hitler.”
The Lee statue in Charlottesville, along with one of Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, was removed in July of this year — four years after the “Unite the Right” rally in the city left one woman dead.
With Post wires