Cities hasten to remove Confederate monuments

Deadly rally in Charlottesville is spurring U.S. officials to publicize plans for statues

In Gainesville, Fla., workers hired by the Daughters of the Confederacy chipped away at a Confederate soldier’s statue, loaded it quietly on a truck and drove away with little fanfare.

In Baltimore, Mayor Catherine Pugh said she’s ready to tear down all of her city’s Confederate statues and the city council voted to have them destroyed.

San Antonio lawmakers are looking at removing a statue that many people wrongly assumed represented a famed Texas leader who died at the Alamo.

The deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., is fuelling another re-evaluation of Confederate statues in cities across the U.S.

“We should not glorify a part of our history in front of our buildings that really is a testament to America’s original sin,” Gainesville Mayor Lauren Poe said Monday after the statue known as “Old Joe” was returned to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which erected it in 1904.

Many officials who were horrified by the events that killed one person and injured dozens more Saturday in Charlottesville soon began publicizing plans to take down statues.

The convergence of white nationalists and neo-Nazis with Confederate imagery in Charlottesville will make it difficult for government agencies to defend having Confederate statues on their property, Boston University history professor Heather Cox Richardson said.

“It was always possible for people to look the other way,” she said.

“After Charlottesville, I do not see how Americans can look the other way. You have to make a choice at this moment.”