Deadly rally accelerating removal of Confederate statues across US
In Gainesville, Florida, 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 ahead to removing a statue from a prominent downtown park.
The deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, is accelerating the removal of Confederate monuments in cities across the nation in much the same way that a 2015 mass shooting by a white supremacist led to the end of the Confederate flag being flown on public property.
“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.
Some people refused to wait. Protesters in Durham, North Carolina, used a rope to pull down a nearly century-old statue of a soldier holding a rifle in front of an old courthouse.
Many officials who were horrified by the events that killed one person and injured dozens more Saturday in Charlottesville soon began publicizing plans to remove statues.
Not everyone is in favor of destruction.
A law professor and director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio called removal a “slippery slope,” saying judging historical figures through a modern lens can be difficult.
“A healthy democracy and people within that democracy should be able to say, ‘This is our history.’ And history is made up of actions of human beings, and human beings aren’t perfect,” said Jeffrey F. Addicott, who stressed he was speaking for himself and not the law school.
Statues, he added, can be moved, but he’s opposed to them being “put in a warehouse never to be seen again because then you’re kind of erasing or rewriting history.”
The director of public history for Northeastern University in Boston suggested adding context to existing Confederate statues and adding new statues to mark prominent slavery or lynching sites throughout the South.
“I think simply destroying them or removing them and turning them into junk metal, there’s a nihilistic element to that. It’s wiping out history,” Martin Blatt said. “However, looked at from the perspective of African-Americans ... I can understand destruction.
In Jacksonville, Florida, City Council President Anna Brosche ordered an immediate inventory of all of the Confederate statues in her city in preparation for their removal.
“These monuments, memorials and markers represent a time in our history that caused pain to so many,” she said Monday.
Lexington, Kentucky, Mayor Jim Gray moved up his announcement by a day in reaction to the weekend bloodshed. Memorials to John C. Breckinridge and John Hunt Morgan are perched outside a former courthouse that was the site of slave auctions before the Civil War.