Baltimore City secretly removes four Confederate statues overnight
For more than a year, the Baltimore City Council and Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh have been in agreement to take down the city’s Confederate statues. The hold up to that plan was what to do with those statues once they were removed. But beginning late at night around 11:30 p.m. on August 15 and lasting through the early morning hours of August 16, four Confederate statues within the Baltimore city limits were removed under the cover of darkness.
The removal of those statues came less than a week after violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, erupted between white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members and counter-protestors attending a “Unite the Right” rally in downtown Charlottesville. That August 12 rally went from violent to deadly and resulted with one dead and 19 injured when a speeding car plowed into a crowd of the counter-protestors. The rally in Charlottesville was planned by white supremacist groups over the removal of a General Robert E. Lee statue from a public park.
Now in Baltimore, only the bases of those four Confederate statues remain in place, many of them still covered with anti-Confederate graffiti. Dozens of city crews and private contractors moved in last night with heavy equipment and cranes and hoisted those statues on to flat-bed trucks to drive them away. Pugh said on the morning of August 16 that crews worked from 11:30 p.m. until 5:30 a.m. to remove the statues. According to the Baltimore Sun:
“It’s done,” she said Wednesday morning. “They needed to come down. My concern is for the safety and security of our people. We moved as quickly as we could.”
Pugh went on to say that Baltimore is still trying to come up with a plan for exactly what to do with those four statues now that they have been removed. CNN reported Pugh as saying that some of statues might end up in cemeteries.
She did say that they were taken down to try and avoid the conflict and violence that went down in Charlottesville on August 12. The Sun quoted the mayor as saying “I did not want to endanger people in my own city. I had begun discussions with contractors and so forth about how long it would take to remove them. I am a responsible person, so we moved as quickly as we could. “
Earlier this week, Baltimore City activists had threatened to tear down one of the statues in Wyman Park, which is only a stone’s throw from the Baltimore Art Museum and the college campus of Johns Hopkins University. That particular monument was actually a double statue of Robert E. Lee & “Stonewall” Jackson. Before those threats could be acted upon though, Baltimore City removed that statue, plus three others: the Roger B. Taney Monument on Mount Vernon Place, the Confederate Women’s Monument on West University Parkway and the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Mount Royal Avenue.
Written by: Ace News Today Staff
