Leaders across the South are rethinking the future of confederate monuments.
DURHAM, N.C. — Protesters will face felony charges for toppling a nearly century-old Confederate statue in front of a North Carolina government building, the sheriff said Tuesday.
Durham County Sheriff Mike Andrews said some of the protesters who tore down the statue Monday had been identified, and investigators were preparing arrest warrants.
But across the South, leaders are rethinking what to do with the controversial monuments.
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 ahead to removing a statue from a prominent downtown park.
The deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., 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, N.C., 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.