The rally was organized to protest the town's planned removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. The rally remained in national news through December 2018 thanks to the trial of James Alex Fields, a white supremacist who purposefully ran his car into a crowd of counter-protestors, killing 32-year old paralegal Heather Heyer. The chant was also heard in October 2017 at the "White Lives Matter" rally in Shelbyville, Tennessee.