Help me understand your position here @sneakypete. Are you saying that the majority of people in Charlottesville *do not want* these statues removed? That might actually be the case; I would be very happy if such data materialized and changed the decision up there but I haven't seen anything to suggest it.
Or are you saying that government can ignore the wishes of a majority of tax paying citizens?
You ask that as if it doesn't already.
My opinion is that monuments should neither be lightly erected nor torn down. Something that person did caused them to be held in high enough esteem that their effigy was crafted in stone or metal and placed in public view. All that has changed is the lens by which we view what they did.
Considering that there were free blacks in the South, the South that Lee and Jackson were defending from Northern Invasion, wasn't being defended just for whites, but for all Southerners, all of whom suffered when the Northern Armies moved through in conquest, whether being press ganged into labor, robbed blind by foraging troops, or any number of other things that conquering armies do when they invade.
Homes, farms, crops were taken, livestock rustled, horses "conscripted", goods stolen. Mills, barns, businesses and homes were put to the torch. Despite the twist that the South fought to defend slavery and nothing else that is taught now as "history", those men fought to defend their families, homes, and homeland, as most did not even own a slave.
It was the Union troops who invaded the South.
Invade my home State, and I'll be out there somewhere doing what I can to resist, too.
I don't care who you are.
That Lee and Jackson were iconic figures in that resistance to being militarily forced to rejoin the Union made them heroes to most, if not all Southerners.
Now, over a century and a half later, they are viewed through a different lens, colored by modern race theories and oversimplified accounts of the war and its causes, by people who seldom, if ever, want for the basic things those who fought were defending.