Preserve Confederate ‘monuments’: majority

View at odds with cities

NEW YORK, Aug 22, (Agencies): A majority of Americans think Confederate monuments should be preserved in public spaces, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll, a view that is at odds with efforts in many cities to remove them.

The Aug 18-21 poll found that 54 percent of adults said Confederate monuments “should remain in all public spaces” while 27 percent said they “should be removed from all public spaces.” Another 19 percent said they “don’t know.”

Responses to the poll were sharply split along racial and party lines, however, with whites and Republicans largely supportive of preservation. Democrats and minorities were more likely to support removal.

Cities across the United States are debating what to do with hundreds of statues, plaques and other monuments to the slave-holding Confederacy. Some monuments already have been removed this year in cities like New Orleans and Baltimore.

The poll also found that the public was almost evenly divided over the deadly “Unite the Right” rally that was called to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The rally was organized by white nationalists and drew members of the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and white supremacists, as well as left-leaning counterprotesters. It quickly erupted into violence, and a 32-year-old woman was killed after a car plowed into a crowd of counter-protesters. The man who police say was driving the car was described by a former teacher as having been “infatuated” with Nazi ideology. There were people among both camps who came carrying sticks and shields.

later blamed “both sides” for the conflict. “You had a group on one side that was bad,” he said. “And you had a group on the other side that was also very violent.”

His comments were met with a chorus of rebukes across the political spectrum, including Republican Party bosses and business leaders. Trump later disbanded two presidential business advisory groups after a growing number of CEO members quit to protest his comments, and all 17 members of Trump’s arts and humanities committee also resigned.

Trump

Also: BRADENTON, Florida:

Several hundred supporters of Black Lives Matter and others rallied Monday evening in a city on Florida’s Gulf Coast to demand the removal of a Confederate monument that has stood for decades outside a courthouse. The protest also drew a smaller number of people to the city of Bradenton who wanted the monument, now clad in protective plywood, to stay.

Bradenton leaders had the plywood put up around the monument in recent days, after a similar debate in led to a violent white nationalist rally Aug 12 in which hundreds clashed violently. After authorities had broken up that rally, a car had rammed into a crowd of counter-protesters that day in Charlottesville, killing a woman and injuring 19 others.

On Monday evening, activists opposed to the Bradenton monument stood shoulder to shoulder with elderly people waving signs against racism. Some signs read: “No racism, no hate.” Activists marched a few blocks from the city’s waterfront to the courthouse plaza, where they gave speeches and chanted.