| Workers remove the monuments to Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate army in the American Civil War, and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, a Confederate general, from Wyman Park in Baltimore |
Workers in Baltimore removed four monuments to the pro-slavery Civil War Confederacy before dawn on Wednesday as the city sought to avoid the sort of protests that occurred last weekend in Virginia over the planned removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
The commanding statues, including one of Lee and one of General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, were dislodged from their bases in Baltimore’s Wyman Park Dell and taken away on a flatbed truck after the city council on Monday approved the action.
Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh said she and the city council decided to remove the monuments “quickly and quietly.”
“I think any city that has Confederate statues (is) concerned about violence occurring in their city,” Pugh told a news conference. “This is not something that is needed.”
“Following the acts of domestic terrorism carried out by white supremacist terrorist groups in Charlottesville, Virginia, this past weekend, cities must act decisively and immediately by removing these monuments,” Baltimore City Councilman Brandon Scott wrote in a resolution calling for removal of the statues.
In Charlottesville on Saturday, white nationalists protesting plans to remove a statue of Lee clashed with counter-protesters. The demonstrations turned deadly when a car rammed into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing a woman and injuring 19 people.
After Saturday’s violence in Virginia, calls increased for memorials, flags and other symbols of the Confederacy to be removed from public places around the United States.
During the American Civil War, Maryland was a slaveholding state.
In Los Angeles on Wednesday, the United Daughters of the Confederacy asked the Hollywood Forever Cemetery to remove a monument that since 1925 had honored Confederate veterans. Cemetery spokesman Theodore Hovey said the organization made the request after hundreds of people demanded it be taken away.
“I think the owner’s main concern was for the monument’s well-being in light of the current atmosphere, and we were concerned about maintaining the tranquility and peace of the cemetery,” Hovey said, adding that the United Daughters of the Confederacy would decide a new location for the statue.
In Birmingham, Alabama’s largest city, Mayor William Bell ordered workers on Tuesday to obscure a Confederate monument in a city park using wooden boards, the Birmingham News reported. A state law passed in May banned local governments from moving historical monuments that have been in place on public property for more than 40 years.