Confederate monuments are being removed around the country under pressure from those who say they honor a regime that enslaved African-Americans. The pace has increased, however, in the wake of last weekend’s deadly confrontation at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
A look at monuments that have been removed, covered up or vandalized in recent days:
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NEW YORK
Plaques honoring Gen. Robert E. Lee were removed from the property of a now-closed Episcopal church in Brooklyn on Wednesday. Gov. Andrew Cuomo also called on the Army to rename two streets at nearby Fort Hamilton that honored Lee and Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
The plaques, including one more than a century old, were taken down at St. John’s Episcopal Church because they were “offensive to the community,” said Bishop Lawrence Provenzano of the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island.
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BALTIMORE
Four Confederacy-related monuments were hauled away on trucks under cover of darkness late Tuesday night and early Wednesday.
Mayor Catherine Pugh said she was concerned that such statues might spark violence.
One monument honored Maryland resident Roger B. Taney, the U.S. Supreme Court justice who wrote the Dred Scott decision denying citizenship to African-Americans.
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DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA
A bronze statue of a Confederate soldier was pulled from its pedestal by protesters Monday night.
The 1924 monument stood in front of a government office building until demonstrators used a rope to pull it down. Four people have been arrested, and authorities plan more arrests.
Gov. Roy Cooper has called for the removal of all Confederate monuments on public property around the state.
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WILMINGTON, NORTH CAROLINA
In another North Carolina town, two Confederate statues were vandalized with spray paint.
Someone also tied a rope around one of the statues in what may have been an attempt to topple it, police said Wednesday. No arrests were immediately made.
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KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE
A 1914 monument honoring fallen Confederate soldiers was splattered with paint. Opponents are signing a petition to have it removed from a neighborhood near the University of Tennessee campus.
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BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA
A 52-foot-tall obelisk honoring Confederate soldiers and sailors was covered by wooden panels at the mayor’s order. The 1905 monument is in a downtown park.
The cover-up Tuesday prompted a lawsuit by Alabama’s attorney general, who argues that it violates a new law prohibiting the removal of historical structures, including rebel memorials.
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LOS ANGELES
Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where many movie legends are interred, removed a 6-foot Confederate monument that was erected in 1925.
The stone and attached plaque were trucked away to storage Wednesday after the cemetery received hundreds of calls and emails requesting its removal.
More than 30 Confederate veterans and their families are buried in the cemetery. Their grave markers will remain.
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SAN DIEGO
The city removed a plaque naming Confederate President Jefferson Davis from a downtown plaza Wednesday.
The plaque honored San Diego as the Western terminus of the Jefferson Davis Highway between Virginia and California. It was presented to the city in 1926 by a state chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
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TAMPA, FLORIDA
A 106-year-old statue of Confederate soldiers will remain on public property unless opponents raise enough money to move it to a private cemetery, officials decided.
The Hillsborough County Commission voted last month to remove the monument but voted Wednesday to do so only if private funds can be raised in 30 days.
(AP)
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6 Responses
I wonder why this is occuring during Trump’s watch?!? After all, these statues have been around for a long time.
If there was actually a racial implication, why didn’t the black president make it a priority when he was in control?!?
George Washington had slaves too, so do we take down the GW bridge or paint it white (or black) or rename it.
Will there ever be a end to this stupidity?
These are the first steps in an attempt to overthrow the government. This is heading towards a civil war, the socialists vs the capitalists; the ones who want to erase history down the memory hole, and the ones who learn from history and choose not to repeat it. The Bill of Rights will be next, Jefferson, a slave owner wrote them. The insanity of the left knows no bounds. We are finally seeing the fruits of the indoctrination of both the public school system (run by teachers unions) and the liberal college professors (who openly espouse socialism).
As a Jew, we need to get our stuff in order. We’re usually target #1 when things break down.
Idiots on the left will do anything to smear the president. They think they are scoring big by pushing this garbage.
In most places where Orthodox Jews live, the local goyim are either Blacks (whose ancestors fought for the Union with great enthusiasm) or post-Civil War immigrants (like most of us) or whites whose ancestors fought for the Union (since most Orthodox Jews live in the north). However in about a third of the country the non-black population is descended for those whose ancestors were the losers in the Civil War, and if they perceive this as a personal attack on their families it could undo the reconciliation that allowed America to recover. Well into the 20th century southerners resented how the United States trashed their region and destroyed its economy, and it might be best to bury the animosity. In Britain they had a vicious set of civil wars from the mid-17th through the mid-18th century, with no real attempts at reconciliation (e.g naming things after Cromwell or “Bonnie Prince Charles” were still controversial into the 20th century), and they are still feeling negative aftershocks from those time. Allowing southerners to honor their war dead and their leaders was a big part of the reconciliation and it might raise problems to cancel it out.
Reply to Health: The monuments to Confederate soldiers were erected principally at the start of the Jim Crow era, i.e., the 1880’s, and again in the 1930’s, when the Civil Rights movement was in its infancy and anti-black racists wanted to abort it. Lynchings of African-Americans peaked in the 1930’s, and there was a surge in Ku Klux Klan membership. Most of these monuments were erected by Southern state and local governments, and neither Barack Obama nor any other US president had the legal authority to remove them. The state and local governments where these monuments are being removed have concluded – correctly, in my opinion – that the Confederate side in the US Civil War was betraying the US Constitution by, among other things, rebelling against the lawful federal government and defending the enslavement and chattelization of human beings.