By Phil Kabler, Charleston Gazette-Mail
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — For the second quarterly meeting in a row, the Capitol Building Commission on Wednesday stonewalled on the matter of the Stonewall Jackson statue and bust on the West Virginia Capitol grounds.
The statuary was not on the commission agenda for a second meeting in a row since the commission held a public hearing on it in December, when seven of eight speakers called for removing the statue from the southeast corner of the Capitol complex and the bust from the Capitol Rotunda.
Two days before that public hearing, Virginia Military Institute removed the duplicate of the Capitol’s Stonewall Jackson statue from its grounds. Last weekend, the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, removed three Confederate statues from town squares, including one of Jackson.
Calls to remove the Jackson statue at the West Virginia Capitol date back a decade, but they intensified last summer as part of a wave of Confederate memorial removals across the South during protests against the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in May 2020…