With the recent attention focused on Confederate symbols in Virginia and around the country, there is a renewed effort underway in Culpeper to have a large Confederate flag removed from a county park.
The flag is about 30 feet above the ground at Lenn Park and flies directly next to an American flag.
A petition has been circulating online, calling for the Culpeper County Board of Supervisors to step in and take the flag down.
As of Friday morning, more than 1,200 people had signed the petition.
“Lenn Park is not used and enjoyed by all the county residents due to the Confederate flag that is proudly displayed,” the petition states. “Symbols of hate have no place in our county.”
The park is near the site where Union and Confederate soldiers fought in the 1863 Battle of Brandy Station.
“It is past time for the flag to come down,” the petition says. “The Confederate battle emblem represents: hatred, death, slavery, and a division amongst all people.”
The county’s website notes that “the park has civil war significance.”
The people who wrote the petition acknowledged that, but asked the question: “Why does this symbol of hate have to be displayed?”
There was an unsuccessful effort in 2015 to have the flag taken down after a white supremacist carried out a mass shooting at a historically Black church in South Carolina.
It is not clear who is in charge of the flag, the county government or members of the Lenn family, who donated the land that the park sits on.
Several dozen Confederate symbols have been removed from public land in the U.S. in the five weeks since the death of George Floyd at the hands of police sparked a nationwide protest movement.
This week in Richmond, work crews used giant cranes, harnesses and power tools to remove imposing statues of Gen. Stonewall Jackson and naval officer Matthew Fontaine Maury from their pedestals as hundreds of onlookers cheered.
The statues were taken away after Mayor Levar Stoney ordered the immediate removal of all Confederate monuments from city land.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
