https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/white-contractors-wouldn-t-remove-confederate-statues-so-a-black-man-did-it/ar-AA15T0tX City and state officials said they turned to Team Henry Enterprises after a long list of bigger contractors — all White-owned — said they wanted no part of taking down Confederate statues.
For a Black man to step in carried enormous risk. Henry concealed the name of his company for a time and long shunned media interviews. He has endured death threats, seen employees walk away and been told by others in the industry that his future is ruined. He started wearing a bulletproof vest on job sites and got a permit to carry a concealed firearm for protection.
The drama interrupted Henry’s careful efforts to build his business. But after removing 24 monuments in Virginia and North Carolina, Henry, 45, has grown more comfortable with his role in enabling a historic reckoning with social injustice across the South. The threats haven’t let up; Henry has simply learned to live with them.
“My head’s in a different place now,” he said. “It’s like, I’m not scared to cross the street, but I’m always going to look both ways, right? So I’m not totally oblivious to who I am and what I’ve done, but I’m just not letting fear kind of drive what I do.”
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He had come to understand that those statues — especially Lee — were like religious objects to their defenders. They had stood more than a century as totems of a powerful mythology: that slavery was somehow benign, that Southerners were the noble victims of Northern aggression, that things were better when White people presided over an orderly world. The Lost Cause.
This is why the statues must be toppled.
As the crane lowered the statue to the ground, Henry was awed by the size of the thing. The crowd surged forward; someone said they wanted to urinate on it. Henry hollered for people to stay back.
Then he noticed one African American woman looking at him with an expression of utter disgust. Henry said he felt confused; wasn’t she happy at what he had just done?
“She was like, ‘Why are you showing so much care to the statue? Just drop it. Just let it go. Just kick it over. Nobody cared about George Floyd, but you care about this statue?’”
Someone gets it!
The statue was hoisted off its pedestal in less than an hour after 131 years of towering over Richmond’s grandest street. Henry’s mother — Freda Thornton, who now lives in South Carolina — ran through the security barricade and surprised her weeping son with a big hug.
“I just kind of held him for a minute, just to let him get himself together,” Thornton remembered. “I told him, ‘You did it, and God’s favor protected you and it’s over.’ I said, ‘It’s over, the work is completed now.’”
Actually, the work is completed only when the colonialist bloodlines are eliminated. Removing statues is merely the warmup.
Henry’s mission as the man who finally drove the Confederates out of Richmond was nearly complete. He had a brief, blunt message that morning for the chilly workers as they prepared to do the unusual work that has become so familiar.
“It’s the last one,” he told them. “Let’s do it right and get out of here.”
Yes, but the Confederates are not statues, but bloodlines. Again, removing statues is merely the warmup.