[4] Before its removal on September 8, 2021,[5] the monument honored Confederate General Robert E. Lee, depicted on a horseback atop a large marble base that stood over 60 feet (18 m) tall.

[4][7] Ralph Northam, the Governor of Virginia, ordered for the statue to be removed on June 4, 2020, but was blocked by a state court pending the outcome of a lawsuit.

[10] The bronze statue, sculpted by Antonin Mercié, depicted Confederate general Robert E. Lee atop a horse.

Richmond City annexed the land in 1892, but economic difficulties meant that the Lee Monument stood alone for several years in the middle of a tobacco field before development resumed in the early 1900s.

[24] Three months later, however, on December 17, crews dismantling the plinth's tower extracted a building block that appeared to contain the time capsule in question.

[25] The lead box recovered from the block instead contained mementos from members of the monument's planning commission that dated no earlier than 1889, after the original time capsule had been assembled.

On June 22, 2021, Governor Ralph Northam announced plans to replace the 1887 time capsule located at the Lee Monument site.

[29] Among the 39 items included were artifacts from the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, a personalized cloth face mask donated by Virginia First Lady Pamela Northam, items from the Mattaponi and Pamunkey nations, a fragment of tarp that covered the Rumors of War statue at its unveiling and a railroad spike found near the Shockoe Bottom African Burial Ground in Richmond.

[31] In August 2017, after the violence that occurred at the 2017 Unite the Right rally, protestors called for the removal of the Lee statues in Charlottesville and Richmond.

[32] On June 4, 2020, Virginia governor Ralph Northam announced that the Richmond statue would be removed in response to the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd.

[33] On June 8, a judge in Richmond Circuit Court issued a temporary injunction against the monument's removal, citing a lawsuit filed by William C. Gregory, who claims the Commonwealth promised to "faithfully guard" and "affectionately protect" the statue in the deed that originally annexed the property to the state.

[41] On September 2, 2021, the Supreme Court of Virginia ruled unanimously in the two separate cases affirming the power of Governor Ralph Northam to order the statue removed from state-owned property.

[42] Following Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020, the traffic circle where the statue stood was unofficially updated with a sign that reads "Welcome to Beautiful Marcus-David Peters Circle, Liberated by the People MMXX": memorializing Marcus-David Peters, a Black man from Richmond who was shot and killed by the police in 2018 after threatening to kill the officer.

[43] In the wake of protests, the graffiti-covered monument increasingly became a venue to portray images of racial justice and empowerment: from ballerinas dancing at the base of the plinth to video projections of George Floyd, Malcolm X, Angela Davis (and others) onto the statue itself.

[44] In October 2020 the graffiti-covered monument was deemed among the most influential American protest artworks since World War II according to the New York Times.

[50][51] The transfer of the Lee statue and other monuments to the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia, was announced December 30, 2021[52] and given unanimous approval by the Richmond City Council the next month.