CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (WINA) – “So today, we’re here to announce that we’ve melted the Lee statue.”

And with that, Jalane Schmidt announced on Thursday that members of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center’s Swords into Plowshares project had witnessed the statue’s demise at an undisclosed location last Saturday.

“We come together this afternoon as a community to announce definitively that racists symbols don’t belong in our parks or in our city,” said Andrea Douglas, the center’s executive director.

The latest step in the journey toward a public work of art was kept under wraps locally until Thursday’s 4:30 news conference in front of Charlottesville Circuit Court.

NPR and The Washington Post had already posted their stories, however, with the paper obtaining exclusive video of the statue being melted.

The project’s next step is choosing an artist. From there, more will be decided on what the new piece of art may look like.