This photo provided by Howard County Government shows workers removing a confederate memorial outside the Circuit Court in Ellicott City, Md., late Monday, Aug. 21. The monument includes the names of dozens of Confederate soldiers from the area. Howard County Executive Allan H. Kittleman said the "more appropriate place for the memorial is in a museum."Mark S. Miller
The five men spoke softly and worked quickly as crickets chirped in the August night. They tipped over the large stone marker to Confederate soldiers outside a courthouse, strapped it to a waiting dolly and hoisted it into a truck. Moments later, the county executive in Ellicott City, Md., announced the removal on Facebook.
The monument, which was dedicated in 1948, was hurtful to many in the community, wrote Allan Kittleman in the wee hours of Tuesday. "Given these feelings and the tragedy in Charlottesville, I felt compelled to remove this memorial from public property," he stated. The marker will be donated to a local museum.
A tectonic shift is underway in the debate over Confederate statues and markers as the U.S. grapples with the aftermath of an Aug. 12 rally by white supremacists and neo-Nazis that led to the killing of a counter-protester. Moves that were until recently viewed as politically impossible – the swift removal of such monuments, for instance – are now happening with regularity.
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At a rally in Arizona on Tuesday night, President Donald Trump lambasted such moves in inflammatory terms. "They're trying to take away our culture, they're trying to take away our history," he said. The politicians removing Confederate monuments are "weak, weak people."
In the past two weeks, at least 12 statues and plaques honouring Confederate leaders have been removed in Texas, Maryland, Florida, New York, Ohio and North Carolina, sometimes in the middle of the night.
Politicians who had not embraced the notion of removing the monuments – like the governor of North Carolina and the mayor of Richmond, Va. – have shifted their public stances. And some cities are gearing up for a confrontation with the state laws that prevent them from relocating the monuments.
"What happened in Charlottesville served to clarify what exactly is at stake," said Kevin Levin, a historian and expert on the Civil War. "It's hard to look away now."
While the controversy over Confederate monuments is not new, it is entering a more urgent and combustible phase following the violence in Charlottesville and Mr. Trump's reaction to it. Mr. Trump condemned bigotry but also equated the white supremacists demonstrating in front of a statute of Confederate General Robert E. Lee with counter-protesters. He called such statues "beautiful" on Twitter.
"Race is a tinderbox issue in America and a normal president would not indulge himself in setting off sparks," said Geoff Garin, a Democratic strategist and pollster. Mr. Trump "took a polarized situation and made it more polarized."
The hundreds of monuments to the Confederacy, which were erected primarily in the 20th century, are the subject of impassioned debate. Some believe the statues are an appropriate way to honour Confederate leaders and soldiers and should remain untouched. Others say the monuments can stay but require additional context to explain the enduring legacies of slavery and the Civil War. And an increasing number of people believe the statues don't belong in public spaces, where they represent an era of white domination over blacks and racial segregation.
In Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, Mayor Levar Stoney attempted to chart a middle path over the future of Monument Avenue, a grand boulevard featuring five statues of Confederate leaders. In June, Mr. Stoney announced the formation of a 10-member commission with the task of determining how best to contextualize the monuments, not remove them.
Four days after the violence in Charlottesville, Mr. Stoney shifted course and said the commission will examine removing or relocating the monuments. "While we had hoped to use this process to educate Virginians about the history behind these monuments, the events of the last week may have fundamentally changed our ability to do so by revealing their power to serve as a rallying point for division and intolerance and violence," the mayor said in a statement.
Farid Alan Schintzius, a longtime Richmond activist and the founder of a group called Truthful History Heals, described this month's events in Charlottesville a "massive rupture." The ground "has shifted underneath all of us," he said. "We have to put removal into the discussion."
That process will face considerable obstacles. There are laws aimed at preserving monuments in several Southern states, including Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama. Last week Roy Cooper, the Democratic governor of North Carolina, called on the state legislature to repeal the law protecting monuments and ordered a review of the costs and logistics involved in removing Confederate monuments from state property.
In Memphis, city leaders are renewing their efforts to remove a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general who was a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, from a city park. Last year the Tennessee Historical Commission rejected the city's request for a waiver from the state law which would have allowed Memphis to remove the statue. Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland is vowing to try again at the next meeting of the commission in October.
Some cities are exploring ways to cover or barricade Confederate monuments, whether to remove them from view or shield them from potential vandalism. In Charlottesville, the city council voted on Tuesday to shroud its statues of Lee and Confederate president Jefferson Davis in black in a gesture of mourning for Heather Heyer, the woman killed when a man attending the Aug. 12 rally drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters.
Mr. Levin said that as an educator, he had tended to view Confederate monuments as "relics that could serve a purpose, by helping us face these difficult questions about our past." But Charlottesville has changed his perspective. If residents reach the conclusion that it is time to remove such monuments, he said, "We should allow these local communities to do it."