Undeterred, U.S. cities ramp up removal of Confederate statues

A Sheriff's deputy stands near the toppled statue of a Confederate soldier in front of the old Durham County Courthouse in Durham, North Carolina, U.S. August 14, 2017. REUTERS/Kate Medley

By Chris Kenning

(Reuters) – Undeterred by the violence over the planned removal of a Confederate statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, municipal leaders in cities across the United States said they would step up efforts to pull such monuments from public spaces.

The mayors of Baltimore and Lexington, Kentucky, said they would push ahead with plans to remove statues caught up in a renewed national debate over whether monuments to the U.S. Civil War’s pro-slavery Confederacy are symbols of heritage or hate.

Officials in Memphis, Tennessee, and Jacksonville, Florida, announced new initiatives on Monday aimed at taking down Confederate monuments. And Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, a Republican, urged lawmakers to rid the state’s Capitol of a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and early member of the Ku Klux Klan.

“This is a time to stand up and speak out,” Lexington Mayor Jim Gray said in an interview on Monday. He had moved up the announcement of his city’s efforts after the Charlottesville violence.

The clashes between white supremacists and counter protesters that left three dead in Charlottesville on Saturday, including two police officers whose helicopter crashed, appeared to have accelerated the push to remove memorials, flags and other reminders of the Confederate cause.

Some opponents appeared to take matters into their own hands. A crowd of demonstrators stormed the site of a Confederate monument outside a courthouse in Durham, North Carolina, on Monday and toppled the bronze statue from its base.

Local television news footage showed numerous protesters taking turns stomping and kicking the fallen statue as dozens of others stood cheering and yelling.

In Baltimore, a Confederate monument of a dying Confederate soldier embraced by a winged angel-like figure was found defaced by red paint, apparently an act of vandalism carried out over the weekend, the Baltimore Sun reported.

The drive by civil rights groups and others to do away with Confederate monuments gained momentum after an avowed white supremacist murdered nine African-Americans at a Charleston, South Carolina, church in 2015. The deadly shooting rampage ultimately led to the removal of a Confederate flag from the statehouse in Columbia.

In all, as of April, at least 60 symbols of the Confederacy had been removed or renamed across the United States since 2015, according to the latest tally by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

But such efforts also have made Confederate flags and memorials a rallying point for white supremacists and other groups of the extreme right, according to Ryan Lenz, a spokesman for the law center, which tracks hate groups.

While opponents of Confederate memorials view them as an affront to African-Americans and ideals of racial diversity and equality, supporters of such symbols argue they represent an important part of history, honoring those who fought and died for the rebellious Southern states in the Civil War.

New Orleans’ efforts to dismantle four Confederate statues sparked protests and litigation that became so contentious that crews waited until the middle of the night to remove a 14-foot-tall bronze likeness of Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard on horseback in May.

The violence in Charlottesville is unlikely to bolster the argument about the value of maintaining the monuments for historical value, Carl Jones, chief of heritage operations for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, said in a telephone interview. But he said he would continue to make that case.

“Where does it stop?” he said. “The Egyptian pyramids were built by slaves. Do we tear those down?”

Across the country, 718 Confederate monuments and statues remain, with nearly 300 of them in Georgia, Virginia or North Carolina, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

There are also 109 public schools named for Robert E. Lee, Confederate President Jefferson Davis or other icons of the Civil War-era South, the group said.

On Monday, Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh said in a statement she intended to move forward in removing several city statutes, including those of Lee and Stonewall Jackson. She stopped short of endorsing some city council members’ calls for the monuments to be destroyed.

Memphis officials said the city would take legal action to get state approval to remove a Confederate statue there. The city council voted to remove it in 2015, but the effort was blocked by the state historical commission, according to a WREG-TV.

In Kentucky, Gray said he had heard opposition to his plans but also had received offers to pay for the statutes to be relocated as early as this fall.

“We expected criticism,” he said. “It’s a challenging and polarizing time – and issue.”

(Story corrects South Carolina capital to Columbia from Charleston in ninth paragraph.)

(Reporting by Chris Kenning; Additing reporting by Steve Gorman; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Richard Chang)

Kentucky town welcomes Confederate memorial moved from Louisville

Members from The Sons of Confederate Veterans stand before a dedication ceremony in Brandenburg, Kentucky, U.S. May 29, 2017 for a Civil War Confederate Soldier Memorial recently removed from the campus of the University of Louisville. REUTERS/Bryan Woolston

By Bryan Woolston

BRANDENBURG, Kentucky (Reuters) – A small Kentucky town gave a formal welcome on Monday to a monument to the Confederate soldiers of the American Civil War, rededicating the controversial structure after the University of Louisville removed it as an unwelcome symbol of slavery.

About 400 people, some dressed in grey replica uniforms and many holding small Confederate battle flags, gathered for the Memorial Day ceremony on a bluff above the Ohio River in Brandenburg, about 40 miles (64 km) southwest of Louisville.

The town embraced the tower at a time when Confederate symbols are being removed across the South as reminders of a legacy of slavery and the racism that underpinned it.

“The way I look at it, it’s part of our history,” Brandenburg Mayor Ronnie Joyner said at the dedication, which included the firing of a Civil War-era cannon. “We need to preserve our history.”

Brandenburg says the riverfront park where it holds a biennial Civil War reenactment was an appropriate setting for what some see as a respectful homage to Kentucky’s fallen.

The monument’s new home is near the spot where a Confederate general in 1863 launched a raid on neighboring Indiana, and Brandenburg hopes the addition will bring more tourists to the town.

“The Civil War is not a popular part of people’s past, but you can’t wipe it out,” said Charles Harper of Louisville, who came to the dedication dressed in Confederate uniform. “Just because you wiped out a reference to the Civil War doesn’t mean you’ve wiped out slavery, doesn’t mean you wipe out racism.”

The 70-foot-tall concrete plinth features an oversized statue of a rebel soldier at its crown, representing one of thousands of Kentuckians who fought with breakaway Southern states in the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history.

Monday’s ceremony, watched by a crowd that was almost exclusively white, marked the end to a year-long saga that began in April 2016 when the University of Louisville announced it would dismantle the monument, erected in 1895.

Students and faculty had long criticized the memorial as a tacit tribute to Confederate cause during the 1861-65 conflict, fought primarily over the issue of slavery.

Last May, a state judge ruled against some Louisville residents and descendants of Confederate soldiers who sued to keep the monument from being moved.

Kentucky was neutral during the Civil War and never joined the Confederacy. But slavery was legal in the commonwealth and many Kentuckians sympathized with the rebel cause and fought on its side.

The drive to remove Confederate statues in the South and elsewhere accelerated after the 2015 murder of nine African-Americans by an avowed white supremacist at an historic South Carolina church. The murders stirred national soul-searching about racism and its symbols.

Soon after the killings, the Confederate battle flag was removed from the grounds of the South Carolina state capitol.

Last week New Orleans dismantled the last of four Confederate statues that stood in the city for decades. The mayor of Baltimore said on Monday that her city was considering following the lead of New Orleans by removing its monuments.

(Additional reporting and writing by Frank McGurty; Editing by Andrew Hay)

New Orleans crews remove second Confederate statue amid protests

A construction crew works to remove a monument of Jefferson Davis in New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S., May 11, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Bachman

By Jonathan Bachman

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters) – New Orleans authorities dismantled a statue honoring president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis amid cries by protesters waving Confederate flags and cheers from a group that said the monument glorified racism in the U.S. South.

Police watched the two groups taunt each other early on Thursday as crews used a crane to pluck the 8-foot (2.4 m) bronze statue from the granite pedestal where it had sat for more than a century on a piece of land near an intersection in the Mid-City neighborhood.

“I am here to witness this debacle, taking down this 106-year-old beautiful monument,” said Pierre McGraw, president of the Monumental Task Committee, which restored the statue as one of its first projects 29 years ago. “It hurts a lot.”

Quess Moore said he came out “to celebrate the victory in the battle against white supremacy, particularly in New Orleans.”

Confederacy statues and flags have been removed from public spaces across the United States since 2015, after a white supremacist murdered nine black parishioners at a South Carolina church.

Critics of the monuments say they foster racism by celebrating leaders of the Confederacy in the pro-slavery South during the U.S. Civil War.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu posted photos on Twitter of the removal of the Jefferson Davis Monument.

“This historic moment is an opportunity to join together as one city and redefine our future,” Landrieu tweeted.

McGraw’s committee rejected that, saying in a statement that the mayor “cannot be inclusive, tolerant, or diverse when he is erasing a very specific and undeniable part of New Orleans’ history.”

A committee member sued on Monday to stop the city from removing a statue of Confederate States Army General P.G.T. Beauregard.

The Davis monument had been frequently vandalized, according to the New Orleans Historical website that showed a photo of the words “slave owner” sprayed in red paint on its base.

The statue will be stored in a city warehouse until a permanent location can be determined, officials said.

The Davis and Beauregard monuments are among four in New Orleans that critics have been pushing to have dismantled. In 2015, the city decided to take them down, and a U.S. appeals court ruled in March that it had the right to proceed.

The first of the monuments was removed last month.

On Sunday, dozens of supporters of the monuments clashed with hundreds of demonstrators near the site of a statue honoring Confederate General Robert E. Lee that is also slated for removal.

(Additional reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Milwaukee and Laila Kearney in New York; Editing by Toby Chopra and Lisa Von Ahn)