New York Times: It was “in the best interest of my city,” Mayor Catherine Pugh said Wednesday, as she explained why she ordered Confederate monuments removed under the cover of darkness, days after violence broke out during a rally against the removal of a similar monument in neighboring Virginia.
“I said with the climate of this nation,” Ms. Pugh said later, “that I think it’s very important that we move quickly and quietly.”
With no immediate public notice, no fund-raising, and no plan for a permanent location for the monuments once they had been excised — all things city officials once believed they would need — the mayor watched in the wee hours on Wednesday as contractors with cranes protected by a contingent of police officers lifted the monuments from their pedestals and rolled them away on flatbed trucks.
After the violent clashes in Charlottesville, Va., many city leaders and even some governors around the country have urged the removal of Confederate monuments in their jurisdictions — a typically bureaucratic process that, in cities like New Orleans and Charlottesville, have been met with legal delays that helped feed tensions surrounding their removal.
But, in an interview here, Ms. Pugh suggested the tense political climate had turned her city’s statues into a security threat and she said that her emergency powers allowed her to have them removed immediately.
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Recent Comments
Ron K. 3 hours ago
How ironic to take down the statue, yet Baltimore has a statue of a man (Ray Lewis) who was involved in a double murder.
Man Deville 3 hours ago
So will gov the statutes of former presidents and slave owners George Washington and Thomas Jefferson also be torn down?
Walker 3 hours ago
Don't forget to take down the head stones of all those that fought for the South along with photos and statues of George Washington and the...
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“The mayor has the right to protect her city,” she said. “For me, the statues represented pain, and not only did I want to protect my city from any more of that pain, I also wanted to protect my city from any of the violence that was occurring around the nation. We don’t need that in Baltimore.”
In recent days, cities and resident from Gainesville, Fla. to Lexington, Ky., called for their Confederate monuments to come down on the heels of the weekend’s violent clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters over a Robert E. Lee statue that is set for removal in Charlottesville.
David Goldfield, a professor of history who studies Confederate symbols at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, said the removal of the monuments in Baltimore was likely to be part of a “rolling cascade” of cities and states ridding themselves of, or at least relocating, similar statues.
”You’re going to see another wave of these removals.” Mr. Goldfield said. “The fact that it’s done fairly expeditiously is not surprising because if you do it quickly the opposition can’t build up, and the confrontations that we’ve had, not only in Charlottesville but elsewhere, will not materialize.” >>>
Hopefully there isn't a newly erected swastika for every fallen statute.
Trump is the Yankee New Yorker who is pretending to be the Son of the South, an alt-Southerner.
He reminds me of the Iranian Monarchists who are against Reza Pahlavi, the alt-Monarchists!