Updated June 30 at 5:40 p.m.

The chair of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors says she feels blessed after the United Daughters of the Confederacy requested its statue back. The monument to Confederate soldiers has stood outside the Loudoun County courthouse in Leesburg for 112 years.

In a letter received by the county board Monday, attorney Stephen Price wrote on behalf of the UDC and asked Randall to contact him to discuss arrangements for removing the statue. In the letter, Price wrote, “as you may be aware, the UDC, not the County, is the owner of the statue.”

“A clear majority [of the board] has expressed their support for its removal,” Price wrote. “Consequently, the Loudoun Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy have directed me to request the statue’s return.”

The letter was made available by the Loudoun Times-Mirror, which first reported the story.

Loudoun’s Confederate Monument is one of some 110 Confederate monuments and symbols in Virginia, which was once the seat of the Confederacy with Richmond as its capital. A Southern Poverty Law Center report from 2019 found that only Georgia had more relics of the Confederacy.

The killing of George Floyd triggered an outpouring of opposition toward those monuments and preemptive action from the UDC.

In Alexandria, the organization opted to remove the “Appomattox” statue in early June. City spokesman Craig Fifer wrote DCist/WAMU that the group notified the city a day before removing it.

Mayor Justin Wilson tweeted photographs of the removal, writing “Alexandria, like all great cities, is constantly changing and evolving.”

The UDC has itself been a target amid protests. In Richmond, the group’s headquarters building was set ablaze on May 31.

Demonstrators toppled a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in Richmond and have covered a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in graffiti, illuminating it at night with projected images of Harriet Tubman and other Black American heroes. The quest to remove that state-owned statue, however, is frozen in court challenges to Gov. Ralph Northam’s promise to remove it.

Until now, Virginia law made it difficult for local authorities to remove Confederate monuments. However, on Wednesday, a new law goes into effect that gives local authorities the power to change their war memorials.

Chair Randall had planned to use that route to take down the monument and intended to begin the process on July 7. In an interview last week with DCist/WAMU, Randall said she despised the statue from the moment she moved to the county nearly 30 years ago.

“It’s total betrayal of me as an American that this is something they’d put up on public, county-owned property in front of the place where you should receive justice,” said Randall, who is African American.

Neither Randall nor Price were available to comment on the process going forward.

Prior to the letter from the UDC, Randall was likely to find a clear path to success on her county board of supervisors. Democrats control the board 6-3, and some Republicans were sympathetic to removing the monument as well.

Still, there was not unanimous consent: Supervisor Caleb Kershner (R-Catoctin), who is white, said he worked at the courthouse for years and didn’t see a connection between the Confederate Monument outside and the proceedings within.

“Simply because we have a Confederate statue in the courtyard that represents a historical thing that occurred 170 years ago has no bearing whatsoever on the justice that is occurring in our courthouse,” he told DCist/WAMU.

This article was updated to include additional reporting and clarify that UDC notified the city of Alexandria before removing the statue, not Fifer’s office specifically.