Undeterred by violence over the planned removal of a Confederate statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, municipal leaders in cities across the United States said this week they would step up efforts to pull such monuments from public spaces.
The mayors of Baltimore and Lexington, Kentucky, said on Monday they would push ahead with plans to remove statues as a national debate flared anew over whether monuments to the Confederacy are symbols of hate or heritage.
A rally by white nationalists protesting plans to remove a statue of General Robert E Lee, commander of the pro-slavery Confederate army in the US Civil War, sparked clashes with anti-racism demonstrators in Charlottesville on Saturday. A woman was killed and 19 people were injured when a car ploughed into a crowd of counter-protesters.
Officials in Memphis, Tennessee, and Jacksonville, Florida, announced new initiatives on Monday aimed at taking down Confederate monuments.
And Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, a Republican, urged lawmakers to rid the state’s Capitol of a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and early member of the Ku Klux Klan.
“This is a time to stand up and speak out,” Lexington Mayor Jim Gray said in an interview on Monday.
Saturday’s clashes between white supremacists and counter protesters in Charlottesville, in which two police officers were also killed when their helicopter crashed, appeared to have accelerated the push to remove memorials, flags and other reminders of the Confederate cause. Some opponents took matters into their own hands.
Demonstrators stormed the site of a Confederate monument outside a courthouse in Durham, North Carolina, on Monday and toppled the bronze statue from its base. Local television news footage showed protesters taking turns stomping and kicking the fallen statue as others cheered.
Durham County Sheriff Mike Andrews said in a statement yesterday that his office would seek vandalism charges against those involved.
The drive by civil rights groups and others to do away with Confederate monuments gained momentum after an avowed white supremacist murdered nine African-Americans at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
The shooting rampage ultimately led to the removal of a Confederate flag from the statehouse in Columbia.
In all, as of April, at least 60 symbols of the Confederacy had been removed or renamed across the United States since 2015, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups. But such efforts have also made Confederate flags and memorials a rallying point for white supremacists and other extreme right groups, according to Ryan Lenz, a spokesman for the centre.
Opponents of Confederate memorials view them as an affront to African-Americans and ideals of racial diversity and equality.
Supporters argue they represent an important part of history, honouring those who fought and died for the rebellious Southern states in the Civil War.
Efforts by New Orleans to dismantle four Confederate statues sparked protests and litigation that became so contentious that crews waited until the middle of the night to remove a 14-foot-tall bronze likeness of Confederate General P G T Beauregard on horseback in May.
The violence in Charlottesville is unlikely to bolster the argument for maintaining the monuments as items of historical value, said Carl Jones, chief of heritage operations for the Sons of Confederate Veterans. But he said he would continue to make that case.
“Where does it stop? The Egyptian pyramids were built by slaves. Do we tear those down?” Jones said in a telephone interview.
Egyptian archaeologists, however, say tombs found near the Great Pyramids prove they were built by free workers, not slaves.
Across the country, 718 Confederate monuments and statues remain, with nearly 300 of them in Georgia, Virginia or North Carolina, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. There are also 109 public schools named for Robert E Lee, Confederate President Jefferson Davis or other leading figures of the Civil War-era South, the group said.
Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh said on Monday she would move forward in removing several statutes, including those of Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
She stopped short of endorsing calls by some city council members for the monuments to be destroyed.
White nationalist leaders plan to hold a rally in Lexington, Kentucky, to oppose the removal of the statues there and are considering a lawsuit, Matthew Heimbach, chairman of the Traditionalist Worker Party, told the Herald-Leader newspaper.
The group said it has not set a date for the protest and did not respond to requests for further comment.
As the debate spread to more cities across the country, Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin, a Republican, told a WVHU radio show on Tuesday that he opposed the removal of such monuments.
“I absolutely disagree with this sanitisation of history,” he said.
A family in a rural US state has renounced one of its own, after he participated in a violent white supremacist rally over the weekend.
Peter Tefft was identified on Twitter through photographs taken at the rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a woman was killed and 19 others injured.
His family reported that it has since been threatened and harassed, according to the North Dakota newspaper The Forum.
In an open letter Monday to the newspaper, the man’s father, Pearce Tefft, said his son would no longer be welcome until he renounces his beliefs.
“I, along with all of his siblings and his entire family, wish to loudly repudiate my son’s vile, hateful and racist rhetoric and actions,” Tefft wrote.
“We do not know specifically where he learned these beliefs. He did not learn them at home.”
Another member of the family went further, telling the newspaper that they were afraid of the avowed white nationalist.
“We don’t feel safe around him, and we don’t know how he came to be this way. My grandfather feels especially grieved, as though he has failed as a father,” Jacob Scott told The Forum in a statement.
Peter Tefft had previously been the target of a campaign by some in his hometown of Fargo to publicly shame him for his beliefs, according to the newspaper.
“I’m a white Christian and 100% pro-white,” he told The Forum in February.