17 August, 2017
My concern is for the safety and security of our people. The Baltimore mayor said she wanted to avoid violence. "Stonewall" Jackson monument in Wyman Park, Aug. 16, 2017, in Baltimore.
He joins a growing number of elected officials who have called for Confederate monuments to be removed following the violent events in Charlottesville, where white supremacists rallied against the city's planned removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. With enough pressure from the public and the support of the governor, who wrote in a Tuesday Medium post that "we cannot continue to glorify a war against the United States of America fought in the defense of slavery", Stein could choose to let a principled municipal government tear down its monuments to the Confederacy with no repercussions.
Taney, a Supreme Court chief justice, led the infamous Dred Scott decision a few years before the Civil War.
Bertram Hayes-Davis, great-great-grandson of the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis told CNN's Don Lemon that such statues should be moved to a museum if "that's offensive to a large majority of the public".
By 3:30 a.m., three of the city's four monuments had been removed.
The city has argued the law doesn't apply because it was not in existence at the time the statue was erected.
The road in question features five statues memorializing Virginians who fought to defend slavery during the Civil War: Robert E. Lee, J.E.B.
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus are reviving calls to remove Confederate statues from the Capitol following the violence at a white nationalist rally in Virginia.
Some say they mark history and honor heritage.
One counterprotester, Heather Heyer, 32, was killed and 19 others were injured when James Alex Fields Jr., 20, allegedly rammed his vehicle into a group demonstrating against the "Unite the Right" rally.
The fate of many symbols has been tied up in the courts, but demonstrators in the North Carolina city of Durham took matters into their own hands on Monday and tore down a statue to a Confederate soldier. Nonviolent protesters on the right side of history can.
Small crowds gathered at the momuments as they were removed. "I wonder, is it George Washington next week?" Not only are neo-Confederates involved in this struggle to protect monuments to their heritage (I use heritage here on objective, because many protesters seem oblivious to accepted historical realities), but we witnessed neo-Nazis as well. But you know what?
The trend of removing prominent Confederate symbols has picked up steam since 2015, following the mass shooting by a white supremacist at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, but the symbols remain commonplace in many states.
It's something that Baltimore had been discussing before and the mayor was already working on, but I think that after you saw these acts of terrorism that were carried out on Saturday, every city in every state across the country is looking at trying to do that and do it with haste.
Millions of Marylanders fought in the Civil War - and almost three times as many fought for the Union than for the Confederacy.
