Baltimore Removes Confederate Statues In the Dead of Night -- 2nd Update
DOW JONES & COMPANY, INC. 9:43 AM ET 8/16/2017
BALTIMORE -- The city of Baltimore removed several Confederate monuments overnight in a move that city officials didn't announce ahead of time.
By dawn, crews had removed three Confederate monuments from their pedestals. They also took down a statue of Roger B. Taney, a Supreme Court chief justice who, while not a Confederate himself, wrote the proslavery Dred Scott decision in 1857.
"I said I would move as quickly as I could, and I did," Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh said, adding, "We didn't need those kinds of symbols."
On Monday, Ms. Pugh had called for the monuments' speedy removal but gave no indication that action was imminent.
She said an announcement wasn't necessary. "What was necessary was to get them moved," she said.
One goal was to avoid demonstrations by those who wanted to see the monuments remain. "It was important to protect the citizens of Baltimore because the protests happening around the country we didn't want to see in our city," she said.
Ms. Pugh said she didn't know yet what will happen to the monuments.
On Monday, the Baltimore City Council unanimously passed a resolution calling for the immediate destruction of all Confederate monuments in the city. On social media, some had promised to take the statues down themselves.
The city's overnight operation came in the wake of violent clashes between white nationalist demonstrators and their opponents in Charlottesville, Va. One woman, 32-year-old Heather Heyer, was killed when an alleged white supremacist drove his car into a group of counter-demonstrators. The driver, a white 20-year-old named James Alex Fields Jr., has been charged with one count of second-degree murder and other charges.
Across the South, Confederate memorials have become a flashpoint since Saturday's violence in Charlottesville. Numerous monuments have been vandalized, and some are being removed. A statue of a Confederate soldier was toppled Monday in Durham, N.C., while monuments in Louisville and Atlanta were splattered with paint.
In Baltimore, one of the now-removed monuments -- honoring Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas " Stonewall" Jackson -- bore new graffiti Tuesday that said "Remember C-Ville," and "Black Lives Matter." A spokesman for Ms. Pugh said she understood the emotions surrounding the issue but didn't support vandalism.
Though Maryland remained in the Union during the Civil War, it was a slave state, and it and the city of Baltimore were home to many ardent secessionists.
All that is remaining of the Lee and Jackson monument is a large stone pedestal that has been vandalized with spray paint. Still etched in the stone are these words, "So great is my confidence in General Lee that I am willing to follow him blind-folded."
Angela Devoti, a 39-year-old artist and activist, said she was driving by one of the monuments around 1 a.m. when she saw crews preparing to dismantle it. She thinks taking down the monuments will help the fractured city, which faces a record homicide rate and lingering tension from riots in 2015 after the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man, from injuries sustained while in police custody.
"Baltimore needed all the boost it can get," she said. "It's definitely a boost to the spirit."
But Ms. Devoti said she met a woman next to the site of the Lee and Jackson monument who disagreed with the decision to take down the monuments and who scrawled "How does this help us?" on the graffiti-covered pedestal base.
James MacArthur, a 52-year-old city resident who calls himself a street reporter and live-streamed much of the dismantling, said he is glad the monuments are down.
"It was a long time coming," he said, adding that they never belonged in a state that didn't join the Confederacy. "This is a majority black city. We would never honor any kind of a Nazi and put it in a Jewish neighborhood. You just wouldn't."
Mr. MacArthur said if the mayor hadn't acted swiftly, he thought it likely members of the public would have toppled least some of the monuments, as happened in Durham, N.C. this week.
"She had to act to avoid chaos," he said.
The fate of Baltimore's monuments had been the subject of debate since the deadly 2015 shooting at a historically African-American church in Charleston, S.C. The city's then-mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, created a seven-person commission to study the issue. Its members included academics and members of the city's public art commission.
In January 2016, the commission recommended keeping two, the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument, and the Confederate Women's Monument, while adding new signage for historical context. And it recommended removing both the Taney statue and the Lee and Jackson monument. Ms. Rawlings-Blake left office in December without taking action on the removal recommendation.
The 1887 Taney statue is in a park in the Mount Vernon neighborhood, feet from the city's Washington Monument.
The Lee and Jackson monument is a relative newcomer, dedicated in 1948 on park land near Johns Hopkins University. The statue was financed by a banker who saw the men as childhood heroes, according to the commission.
In 2016 city officials said they approached Confederate groups about taking them, but said they either can't afford to take the monuments or don't want them to be moved.
The commission recommended offering the Lee and Jackson monument to the National Park Service for the Chancellorsville, Va., Civil War battlefield historic site. The monument depicts the generals on horseback before the 1863 battle.
Such a transfer to a Civil War battlefield hasn't happened in at least 20 years, according to officials with the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park in Virginia, about 10 miles east of Chancellorsville. Nor do park service policies appear to allow it. The service won't acquire historic structures for relocation to parks "unless those structures were removed from the park and are necessary to achieve the park purpose or authorized legislation," its rules state.
Write to Scott Calvert at scott.calvert@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
08-16-170943ET
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