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| Catherine E. Pugh, Democratic Politician :-) |
BALTIMORE
— It was “in the best interest of my city,” Mayor Catherine Pugh said
Wednesday, as she explained why she ordered Confederate monuments
removed under the cover of darkness, days after violence broke out
during a rally against the removal of a similar monument in neighboring
Virginia.
“I
said with the climate of this nation,” Ms. Pugh said later, “that I
think it’s very important that we move quickly and quietly.”
With
no immediate public notice, no fund-raising, and no plan for a
permanent location for the monuments once they had been excised — all
things city officials once believed they would need — the mayor watched
in the wee hours on Wednesday as contractors with cranes protected by a
contingent of police officers lifted the monuments from their pedestals
and rolled them away on flatbed trucks.
After
the violent clashes in Charlottesville, Va., many city leaders and even
some governors around the country have urged the removal of Confederate
monuments in their jurisdictions — a typically bureaucratic process
that, in cities like New Orleans and Charlottesville, have been met with
legal delays that helped feed tensions surrounding their removal.
But,
in an interview here, Ms. Pugh suggested the tense political climate
had turned her city’s statues into a security threat and she said that
her emergency powers allowed her to have them removed immediately.
“The
mayor has the right to protect her city,” she said. “For me, the
statues represented pain, and not only did I want to protect my city
from any more of that pain, I also wanted to protect my city from any of
the violence that was occurring around the nation. We don’t need that
in Baltimore.”
In
recent days, cities and resident from Gainesville, Fla. to Lexington,
Ky., called for their Confederate monuments to come down on the heels of
the weekend’s violent clashes between white supremacists and
counterprotesters over a Robert E. Lee statue that is set for removal in Charlottesville.
David
Goldfield, a professor of history who studies Confederate symbols at
the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, said the removal of the
monuments in Baltimore was likely to be part of a “rolling cascade” of
cities and states ridding themselves of, or at least relocating, similar
statues.
”You’re
going to see another wave of these removals.” Mr. Goldfield said. “The
fact that it’s done fairly expeditiously is not surprising because if
you do it quickly the opposition can’t build up, and the confrontations
that we’ve had, not only in Charlottesville but elsewhere, will not
materialize.”
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| Is this where all America History ends up at, the junkyard? |
