Monuments continue to fall

Spectators in North Carolina’s capital cheered Sunday morning as work crews finished the job started by protesters Friday night and removed a Confederate statue from the top of a 75-foot (232 metre) monument.

Across the country, an initially peaceful protest in Portland, Oregon, against racial injustice turned violent early Sunday: Batonwielding police used flash-bang grenades to disperse demonstrators throwing bottles, cans and rocks at sheriff’s deputies near downtown’s Justice Center.

News outlets reported that work crews acting on the order of Democratic North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper removed the statue Sunday morning and began taking down the obelisk on which it stood.

Sunday’s work follows the removal of two other Confederate statues on the state capitol grounds in Raleigh on Saturday.

Cooper ordered the statues removed after protesters toppled two other Confederate statues Friday night, stringing one up by the neck and hanging it from a light pole.

“Monuments to white supremacy don’t belong in places of allegiance, and it’s past time that these painful memorials be moved in a legal, safe way,” Cooper said in a press release Saturday.

A 2015 law bars removal of the statues without approval of a state historical commission, but Cooper said he’s acting under a publicsafety exception to the law out of concern for the danger presented when protesters seek to topple the statues themselves.

Cooper has advocated the statues’ removal for years.