Story highlights The mayor wants an appropriate memorial for Heather Heyer

A Heal Charlottesville Fund has been launched, the mayor said

(CNN) Earlier this year, Charlottesville Mayor Mike Signer voted against moving the Robert E. Lee statue out of a city park. Instead, he wanted to create "a new context" around the statue of the Confederate general.

Now Signer has changed his mind. He wants Lee gone ASAP.

"I think everything changed last weekend," Signer said Friday on CNN's "AC360," referring to the violence that broke out when white supremacists and neo-Nazis came to demonstrate against the removal of the statue and clashed with counterprotesters.

"I think that was one of those moments in the nation's history where everything turns," he said. "I've been likening it in my mind to Dylann Roof, and the water hoses on the peaceful protesters in Birmingham, or Joseph Welch confronting McCarthy, saying 'At long last, have you no decency?'"

"All of a sudden these statues of Civil War generals installed in the Jim Crow era, they became touchstones of terror," he continued, "the twisted totems that people are clearly drawn to, trying to create a whole architecture of intimidation and hatred around them that was visited around our town. It was evil."

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