The stone memorial was approximately 10 feet (3.0 m) tall, and was erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the fall of 1960,[1] just as the first two black students were enrolled in the all-white school system.

In June 2020, the Roanoke City Council voted to start the legal process to remove the monument and rename Lee Plaza after the July 1, 2020 date when a new state law did away with the prohibition against removing monuments to the Confederate States of America.

[3] A 70-year-old man named William Foreman, who was caught vandalizing the monument the night before it was torn down, was arrested on July 24, 2020, and eventually pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.

[4] Lee Plaza was renamed Lacks Plaza after Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman whose cells are the source of the first immortalized human cell line, and who was born in Roanoke.

The proposed location for the re-erecting the statue is at the east end of the park adjacent to the flagpole dedicated to the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster.