US military chief: I was wrong to join church walk
Pelosi urges Congress to remove Confederate statues from Capitol
Protests spread nationwide in response to the killing of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes in Minneapolis on May 25.
On Wednesday, House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged Congress to immediately take steps to remove from the US Capitol 11 statues representing Confederate leaders and soldiers from the Civil War. “Their statues pay homage to hate, not heritage. They must be removed,” Pelosi, the country’s top elected Democrat, said in a letter to leaders of a congressional committee in charge of managing the statues on display at the Capitol.
Her call comes as the country grapples with questions about racial inequality and police brutality.
Since Floyd’s death, officials in the South – where African-Americans were enslaved until the end of the 1861-1865 Civil War – are now ordering the removal of monuments honoring the Confederacy.
The Confederate statues in the US Capitol, which has a large number of monuments to figures in American history, include General Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, who was president of the Confederacy.
The joint committee to which Pelosi made her appeal for taking down the statues has members of both political parties, and it was unclear how the panel would respond. Under a long-standing tradition, each US state sends two statues to the Capitol.
President Donald Trump earlier on Wednesday rejected the idea of renaming US military bases that are named for Confederate leaders, dismissing appeals made after Floyd’s death, which ignited nationwide and international protests.
The US Navy said on Tuesday
it was working to ban the Confederate battle flag from all public spaces on its installations, ships and aircraft.
On Wednesday night, protesters toppled a statue of Jefferson Davis in the Virginia state capital of Richmond, the latest US monument to be torn down during nationwide demonstrations demanding an end to racial injustice.
Footage posted on social media showed the statue of the president of the pro-slavery Confederate states being pulled into a tow truck and hauled away as people cheered. The base of the statue was covered with graffiti.
The monument stood along Richmond’s Monument Avenue, which is lined with statues of several prominent Confederate figures. The city served as capital of the Confederacy for almost the entirety of the war.
Many Southerners defend the monuments as tributes to war dead and part of the country’s history, and vigorously oppose their removal despite their association with slavery and racism.
On Monday, a judge in Richmond issued a 10-day injunction against Governor Ralph Northam’s decision to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from the city.
Earlier on Wednesday in Portsmouth, Virginia, protesters beheaded and defaced statues that were part of the city’s Confederate monument.
A group of protesters also pulled down a statue of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus in Saint Paul, Minnesota, on Wednesday, and a monument to Columbus erected in Richmond in 1927 was vandalized and thrown into a lake on Tuesday.
In the early hours of Wednesday in Boston, the head of a Columbus statue was also removed.
While Columbus was long hailed for opening the New World up to European civilization and settlement, present-day scholars acknowledge a more complicated legacy, including enslavement and subjugation of indigenous people.