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Duke University authorized the removal of a Gen. Robert E. Lee statue from the front of its chapel Saturday after students made very clear they don’t want the Confederate monument there anymore.
Vincent Price, president of Duke University, said on the university website that he made the decision with “strong support of the Board of Trustees” after the monument was defaced on Wednesday.
“I took this course of action to protect Duke Chapel, to ensure the vital safety of students and community members who worship there, and above all to express the deep and abiding values of our university,” Price said in the post Saturday.
The Durham, North Carolina, university looks set to follow other institutions and relocate its monument. The memorial will be “preserved” in some capacity, Price said, “so that students can study Duke’s complex past and take part in a more inclusive future.”
Last Saturday, one person was killed and several others were injured during a “Unite the Right” rally around a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia. (Not that Confederate Gen. Lee himself would have wanted the statue up in the first place.)
The violent event set off a nationwide firestorm that led to the toppling of a Confederate monument outside a Durham courthouse on Monday.
On Saturday, Boston prepares for its own so-called “alt-right” rally, as police brace for thousands of counterprotesters and, possibly, white supremacist figureheads who were seen in Charlottesville over the weekend.
Ahead of the event, a holocaust memorial was vandalized in Boston on Monday night, the second vandalism to that monument this summer.
In the two years since white supremacist and Confederate flag admirer Dylann Roofmassacred nine black parishioners at a South Carolina church, the movement to remove Confederate symbols from public property has gained momentum.
So far more than 60 Confederate symbols have been removed from city- and state-owned land across the U.S., according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Recently, the city of New Orleans toppled four statues honoring the Confederacy
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https://finance.yahoo.com/news/confederate-monuments-removed-baltimore-media-103547428.html
By Gina Cherelus
(Reuters) - Baltimore removed four monuments to the pro-slavery Civil War Confederacy before dawn on Wednesday, working quickly so the city could avoid protests like the one organised by white nationalists that turned deadly in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The statues, including one of General Robert E. Lee and another of General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, were taken off their bases in Wyman Park Dell, beside the Baltimore Museum of Art, and carried away on a flatbed truck.
Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh said she and the city council decided to remove the monuments "quickly and quietly."
"I think any city that has Confederate statues (is) concerned about violence occurring," she told reporters.
City Councilman Brandon Scott had called for immediate action following the "domestic terrorism" carried out on Saturday by white supremacists in Charlottesville.
A 32-year-old woman was killed and 19 people were injured in the Virginia college town when an Ohio man crashed a car into anti-racist protesters.
Following the violence, calls increased for removal of Confederate memorials, flags and other symbols from public places around the United States.
Maryland was a slaveholding state during the Civil War.
In Los Angeles on Wednesday, the United Daughters of the Confederacy asked the Hollywood Forever Cemetery to remove a monument that since 1925 honoured Confederate veterans. Cemetery spokesman Theodore Hovey said the organisation made the request after hundreds of people demanded it be taken away.
"I think the owner's main concern was for the monument's well-being in light of the current atmosphere, and we were concerned about maintaining the tranquillity and peace of the cemetery," Hovey said, adding that the United Daughters would find a new location for the statue.
In Birmingham, Alabama's largest city, Mayor William Bell ordered workers on Tuesday to obscure a Confederate monument in a city park using wooden boards. The state attorney general, Steve Marshall, sued the city in response, saying the barriers broke a state law passed in May that banned local governments from moving or altering historical monuments that have been on public property for more than 40 years.
The mayor said the city will fight the lawsuit and ultimately try to get the monument removed from the park.
"When you really look at what the Confederacy and the monuments really represent, they represent acts of sedition against the United State of America," Bell said in a telephone interview.
In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo wrote to the U.S. Army urging it to remove the names of Jackson and Lee from streets on Fort Hamilton Army Base in Brooklyn.
Cuomo said the Charlottesville violence and the tactics of white supremacists "are a poison in our national discourse, and every effort must be made to combat them."
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Twitter that, following the violence in Charlottesville, the city will conduct a 90-day review "of all symbols of hate" that may be on its property.
(Reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee, and Gina Cherelus, Jonathan Allen and Peter Szekely in New York; Editing by David Gregorio, Toni Reinhold)
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http://www.politico.com/interactives/2017/confederate-monuments-statues-and-symbols-in-the-south/
While the symbols are a nod to the Civil War, the majority were dedicated between 1900 and 1920, when the South enacted Jim Crow laws.
By JEREMY C.F. LIN and LILY MIHALIK | 08/18/17 04:21 PM EDT
In the map below, Dots represent confederate symbols and Shaded areas represent former Confederate states
10% Light color to 80% dark color
More than 1,500 symbols of the Confederacy dot the U.S. countryside, according to an April 2016 review by the Southern Poverty Law Center. A POLITICO analysis found that 179, or nearly12 percent of these symbols, are in counties with a majority black population, according to 2016 census data. Forty-five of those symbols are in counties with a black population of more than 70 percent.
The majority of these symbols were dedicated between 1900 and 1920, when the South enacted Jim Crow laws aimed at resegregating society or discriminating against blacks. There was also a notable spike in new symbols during the height of the civil rights movement.
Among states with the highest proportion of African-Americans, Mississippi, whose population is 37 percent black, has more than 130 commemorations, while Louisiana, which is 32 percent black, is home to 91 symbols. Georgia, whose population is 30.5 percent black, has 175 monuments.
In
Jackson, the state capital, has nine commemorations, including the state flag. Moss Point is a hotbed of Confederate namesakes, with 18 roads in the city named for Confederate Gens. John C. Breckinridge, James Longstreet and Robert E. Lee, among others.
In
Louisiana has a total of 91 symbols, including 13 in Baton Rouge. New Orleans had 13 monuments at the time of the 2016 survey. At least four have been removed since that time
In
Georgia has 175 monuments, including five in Atlanta, the state capital. Savannah has 13, including 10 roadways named for Confederate leaders such as Gens. Nathan Bedford Forrest and J.E.B. Stuart.
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Just goes to show that the USA is not this spectacular role model that some people have in their heads
but, like every other country on the planet, it is a country struggling to break away from a dismal and troubled past
to build a new possibility.
On my list, on a scale of 1 to 10 it scores the following, where 10 is the most commendable statistic.
Academic excellence: 7
Education and campus management: 2 (School shootings take a toll)
Economy: 5 (Debt management and high per capita debt ratio undercut a reasonably good economy)
Cultural /Soft Power: 9
Political Stability: 7 (10 if defined in terms of the absence of coups) but it is a duopoly with hegemonic corporatist overtones.
Industrial Relations: 6
Race relations: 2
We applaud the successful removal of the Baltimore statues.
Other removals to follow.
GE
The following is a partial list of monuments and memorials to General Robert E. Lee, who served as General in Chief of the Armies of the Confederate States in 1865.
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