Protesters in North Carolina posted a video Monday of their tearing down a Confederate memorial, the most violent of several actions against Civil War artifacts in the wake of the weekend violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Clips posted on social media show a group of at least a hundred in Durham pulling down a Confederate soldier statue in front of the local government building.
They can be heard yelling “No KKK! No fascist USA! No Trump!” until cheers break out as the statue atop the memorial gets pulled down. Many protesters can then be seen kicking the statue.
There is no indication in the video that any police officers or other officials are trying to stop the public vandalism.
One protest organizer told local TV station WNCN that the group committed the action as retaliation for the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, which turned deadly when a car plowed into a crowd of counterprotesters.
“It needs to be removed,” Loan Tran told WNCN. “These Confederate statues in Durham, in North Carolina, all across the country.”
#BREAKING Protesters in #Durham topple confederate monument downtown pic.twitter.com/a3BNIavyxC
— Derrick Lewis (@DerrickQLewis) August 14, 2017
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, was less enthusiastic.
“The racism and deadly violence in Charlottesville is unacceptable but there is a better way to remove these monuments,” he wrote on Twitter after the Durham video spread across social media.
Indeed, all across the South there were both demonstrations and vandalism around Civil War memorials and more calls from officials that they be removed according to law.
A Confederate memorial on private ground in Hillsborough County, Florida, was splashed with red paint. And in Atlanta, the protesters spray-painted a statue of a Confederate soldier laying down his arms and chanted anti-Trump slogans.
According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, metal falling from the statue injured one protester.
In Nashville, Tennessee, demonstrators protested a bust in the state Capitol of Nathan Bedford Forrest, who helped found the Ku Klux Klan after the Southern defeat.
According to the Tennessean, Monday’s demonstrators “sang songs such as ’This Little Light of Mine’ and voiced their frustrations in chants- — ’White silence is violence,’ ’Which side are you on?’ and ’Tear it down.’” The bust was not vandalized.
Its removal would require a two-thirds vote of the state’s Historical Commission.
In Gainesville, Florida, the city removed Monday the bronze “Old Joe” statue from the position it has had since 1904, outside the Alachua County Administrative Building. According to the Gainesville Sun, the county will return it to the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
In Baltimore, Mayor Catherine Pugh said in a Monday press statement that she will remove all of Baltimore’s Confederate-era monuments.
According to Baltimore CBS affiliate WJZ, the memorials are the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Mount Royal Avenue, the Confederate Women’s Monument on West University Parkway, the Roger B. Taney Monument on Mount Vernon Place, and the Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson Monument in the Wyman Park Dell.
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
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