Confederate monuments in Baltimore were quietly removed and hauled away on trucks in darkness early Wednesday, days after a violent white nationalist rally in Virginia that was sparked by plans to take down a similar statue there.
Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh told The Baltimore Sun that crews began removing the city’s four Confederate monuments late Tuesday and finished around 5:30 a.m. Wednesday.
“It’s done,” Pugh told the newspaper. “They needed to come down. My concern is for the safety and security of our people. We moved as quickly as we could.”
Video taken by WBAL-TV shows workers using a crane to lift the towering monument to Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson onto a flatbed truck in the dark.
Pugh said Monday that she had contacted two contractors about removing the monuments, but declined to say when they would come down, saying she wanted to prevent the kind of violence seen in Charlottesville, Virginia. Pugh said at the time that she wants the statues to be placed in Confederate cemeteries elsewhere in Maryland.
A commission appointed by the previous mayor recommended removing a monument to Marylander Roger B. Taney, the Supreme Court justice who wrote the Dred Scott decision denying citizenship to African-Americans, as well as a statue of two Virginians — the Confederate generals Lee and Jackson.
Instead, former Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake put up signs calling them propaganda designed to falsify history and support racial intimidation.
Baltimore’s swift removal of the monuments comes days after what is believed to be the largest gathering of white supremacists in a decade — including neo-Nazis, skinheads and Ku Klux Klan members. They descended on Charlottesville for a rally prompted by the city’s decision to remove a monument to Lee.
Violent clashes broke out between white nationalists and counterprotesters and a woman was killed when a car plowed into a crowd of people who were there to condemn the white nationalists.
A memorial service for 32-year-old Heather Heyer is scheduled Wednesday morning at a downtown Charlottesville theater.
(AP)
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8 Responses
1. Due to demographic changes, Baltimore has long since become a northern city (i.e. most of the non-blacks in the city are post-Civil War immigrants or migrants from the north). One should also note that the more rural parts of the state, which is the Republican “base” in Maryland politics, was loyal to the United States and would have seceeded from Maryland (similar to West Virginia) had Maryland joined the Confederacy (something probably prevented when the government rounded up the rebel wannabees and suspended habeas corpus to keep them from making trouble). There is no “pro-confederate” lobby in Maryland. Even if Baltimore was a southern city in 1861, today it is a northern city.
2. The original “agreement” to treat the defeated rebels honorably (in a similar situation the previous century, the British confiscated rebel property and engaged in ethnic cleansing) enabled the US to recover. While most Americans regard the Civil War as something that happened before we moved here, a large part of the population in the southern states are descendants of the losing side and might take offense to their anestors being degraded and reopen the regional wounds. The monuments were put there to rebuild national unity, and it might be unwise to unstitch that which was carefully woven.
3. We should ask how we would feel if there were monuments to people such as General Rommel or Admiral Canaris (both analogies to someone such as Lee or Jackson).
Welcome to Black Lives Matter erasure of American history replaced with their own warped and hateful view.
Taking down these statues sets s dangerous precedent. What’s next? Demolish Mount Rushmore? Rename the George Washington Bridge?
akuperma,
It may feel good to sift history into a simple story, but it leads to inaccuracy.
1. In 1861, while northern and western parts of Maryland were more pro-Union due to higher populations of German immigrants and cultural and economic ties to the North, southeastern Maryland, with its tobacco economy, was more aligned with the South. Marylanders were sharply divided in their sympathies, although a majority rejected secession, partly due to the economic impact secession would have on Baltimore if the port was blockaded by the Federal navy, and inevitable invasions of Maryland along the long border with Pennsylvania.
2. The monuments were NOT put there to rebuild national unity. Most of these monuments were installed after World War I, and were a reflection of white supremacist sentiments during the Jim Crow backlash era, and a whitewashing of history via the “Lost Cause” false narrative.
3. What on earth is analogous between Rommel and Lee?
akuperma
As Avram pointed out, there is no analogy between Rommel and Lee. There was no reconciliation between Nazi Germany and the Allies – the former were simply eradicated and in German law remain so eradicated. The very eradication was the reconciliation with the modern Germany. Lee is (one ) symbol of reconciliation.
1. Maryland was split in 1861, but due to migrations the people in Maryland today (in the “core” of the state being the Baltimore-Washington area) are either African Americans or those who came post-war as immigrants, whereas the western counties (which usually vote Republican today) are still dominated by descendants of pro-union Marylanders. In any event, secession never was really decided democratically since Habeus Corpus was suspended and pro-secession politicans were either arrested or forced to flee.
2. Toleration of the monuments reflected the desire of most Americans to integratge the defeated south back into the country. There was a desire to avoid a permanent national split and to be reconciled (and that included tolerating Jim Crow in the southern states). Britain’s civil strife in the 18th century was never totally resolved for a long time (and was still messing with the country’s stability, and survival, into the 20th century) – the US wanted the Civil War to exist only as history and not as a factor in political life. Honoring rebel war dead was a way of accomplishing that.
3. Neither Rommel nor Canaris were especially anti-semitic. Both objected to the holocaust. They were also great German military leaders. Neither Jackson nor Lee were especially racist. Neither owned plantations and both expressed less than enthusiasm for slavery. Lee was very important in convincing the south to give up rather the continue war, largely as what we would now call guerillas. How would we feel if Rommel or Canaris were honored by a statue in Baltimore? They are among the least obnoxious of the German leaders.
akuperma,
Lee never owned a plantation? Ever hear of Arlington, Virginia? Despite George Washington Parke Custis’s will stipulating that the executor free the plantation’s slaves within 5 years, Lee refused to free them until the Civil War was raging, was much harsher with them than Custis, and sold many of them to other plantations, ripping families apart.
Please learn some real history, and lay off the Lost Cause propaganda.
Personally, I really don’t care about Statues, but when something makes no sense and is illogical or both, there is always much more behind it. Democrats have controlled Baltimore forever, Obama had control for eight years and there was never an issue of Statues.
This just seems as another step in the culture war to destroy the U.S. as we know it.