Baltimore: ALL Confederate Statues Have Now Been Removed

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A Confederate statue that has sparked contention in Western North Carolina will be destroyed rather than moved to another location or stored in a warehouse.

Asheville city leaders on Tuesday voted 6-1 to remove the Vance Monument, which honors former N.C. Gov. Zebulon Vance, a white supremacist. It has stood since 1897 at a downtown site where slaves may have been sold.

The city council’s decision paves a way for destroying the 75-foot obelisk — a marked change from plans for other Confederate monuments across the state that are being stored or moved rather than demolished.

“We have written in the scope for the bidding that the contractor must remove and dispose of all portions of the monument,” Jade Dundas, capital projects director for the city, told McClatchy News.

The city must approve the way the demolished monument is discarded, according to documents. Parts of the statue can’t be used again in “similar likeness,” and intact pieces from the project can’t be sold or given away.

In Asheville, the city council took a step toward demolishing the monument after a task force called for its removal, citing concerns about safety, a potential blow to tourism and impacts on people who view it as a symbol of white supremacy. Most people who shared public comments wanted it removed, according to the group’s recommendation.

“The story of Zebulon Vance and the Civil War live on in documents, books, and memory institutions like museums and historic sites,” the task force wrote. “Removing the monument is an acknowledgement of our racist history and will allow our community the opportunity to move forward in unity.”

But some have contended that taking down monuments in Asheville and beyond removes Southern heritage and Civil War history.

“Increasingly, the monument has become a focal point for protests and counter protests, often resulting in a dangerous condition for the community,” the city said in a news release. “For these reasons, it was deemed a public safety threat.”

Under a plan presented to city leaders, demolishing the monument is expected to cost roughly $114,000. MS Lean Landscaping, a Black-owned business, would temporarily restore the site for another $23,000, according to a document shared with McClatchy News.

After a month and a half, a team is expected to start making future plans for the site.

“I am looking forward to the day that we have a centerpiece in our city that reflects our Asheville today,” Mayor Esther E. Manheimer said before Tuesday’s vote, according to video of the council meeting.

While the monument that bears Vance’s name is a recognizable landmark in Asheville, it has long been a point of contention.

The monument was named after Vance, a Buncombe County native born in 1830 to a family that owned enslaved people, according to DocSouth at the UNC University Library.

Vance became a Confederate officer and was first elected North Carolina governor during the Civil War. He served as a U.S. senator from 1879 until he died in 1894.

“Of all of Governor Vance’s policies, the most remarkable was his insistence, in the midst of the devastation and confusion of war, upon the maintenance of the rule of law,” the N.C. Historical Sites said on its website.

Vance believed in white supremacy and used “extremely racist dialogue to gain supporters,” according to historians. He strayed away from the Republican party and supported the Conservatives at a time when officials said the Ku Klux Klan resorted to murder to influence state elections.

“The Klan’s violence, supported by the Conservative party, intensified in advance of the 1870 election,” N.C. Historic Sites said. “Vance capitalized on the tension created by the Klan in the mountain region to help the Conservatives sweep the western counties.”

Among those arguing in favor of the Asheville monument’s removal was a relative of Vance.

That's great.

Now if we could only end school segregation in Baltimore. It's an even worse problem also caused and maintained by the Democratic Party of America.

To be honest, all statues about anything should be removed because someone somewhere might find them offensive at one point in time. So it is best if we ban all statues and take down museums etc.

The Irishman who takes offense at a statue of Oliver Cromwell is more valid than the American white supremacist who takes offense at a statue of Martin Luther King Jr. .

The Virginia Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Charlottesville can remove two statues of Confederate generals, which civil rights activists say paid homage to America's history of slavery and racism.

The statues depict Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson and were the site of protests decrying police brutality and racism this summer.

The Robert E. Lee statue was also at the center of a violent white nationalist "Unite the Right" rally in 2017 that left one woman dead.

In Thursday's decision, State Supreme Court Justice Bernard Goodwyn said both statues were erected long before a 1997 state law barred local governments from removing monuments paying tribute to past wars.

He said the law only applies to monuments erected after 1997.

The law "did not provide the authority for the City to erect the Statues, and it does not prohibit the City from disturbing or interfering with them," Goodwyn wrote.

In the decision, the court affirmed the 2017 opinion of Attorney General Mark Herring, who argued the law "does not apply to any monument or memorial erected on any property within an independent city prior to 1997."

I have worked hard to help remove poisonous Confederate propaganda from our publicly-owned spaces, because I believe it glorifies a false history and sends a dangerous and divisive message about who and what we value," Herring said. "This work will continue, and I look forward to making our case for the removal of the state-owned Robert E. Lee statue before the Supreme Court of Virginia this summer."

The Charlottesville City Council praised the decision in a statement Thursday, saying it intends to redesign the parks "in a way that promotes healing and that tells a more complete history of Charlottesville."

A high school that was named after a Ku Klux Klan leader will strip the name and instead honor the late baseball Hall of Famer Hank Aaron.

The Atlanta Board of Education voted unanimously Monday to change the name of Forrest Hill Academy to Hank Aaron New Beginnings Academy, news outlets reported. The new name is expected to be in place by the time students return to the southwest Atlanta alternative school in August.

Aaron, a former Atlanta Braves baseball player, died in January at the age of 86. Under the nickname “Hammerin’ Hank," he set a wide array of career hitting records during his 23-year span, ultimately breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record while enduring racist threats.

Forrest Hill Academy had been named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

The board's vice chair, Eshé Collins, said the decision has also led to discussions about renaming the street the school is located on, Forrest Hills Drive, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

Changes announced last week at Georgia’s Stone Mountain Park, home to the nation’s largest Confederate monument, are “the boldest step that has been taken” at the park since the state bought it decades ago, according to a park official.

Critics, though, say it isn’t nearly bold enough.

The park’s board last Monday voted — unanimously, but with one abstention, according to its chairman — to add an exhibit to an existing museum that will tell “the whole story” of the monument — a giant carving of Confederate leaders on horseback — including the history of the Ku Klux Klan on the mountain and its rebirth there in 1915, among other things.

“We took the appropriate actions, and it’s the boldest step that has been taken at Stone Mountain Park since the park was acquired in 1962,” said Bill Stephens, the CEO of the Stone Mountain Memorial Association (SMMA), which oversees the park, about 15 miles east of Atlanta. “There have been virtually no changes to the Confederate imagery or anything since that time, and now we’re moving forward.”

But critics remain as unmoved as the granite the monument is carved into. They say the changes are tinkering on the edges, especially in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and renewed calls for the removal of Confederate monuments and symbols around the country.

“They’re really much ado about nothing,” said Richard Rose, president of Atlanta’s NAACP. “These changes don’t mean anything.”

The board also voted to move Confederate flags — the battle flag among them — from their current heavily trafficked spot at the base of the trail leading up to the mountain top — to a more obscure location, and to remove the Confederate carving from the SMMA’s logo.

“It’s nothing more than moving some chess pieces around the park, if you will,” said Collard. “When what really needs to happen is the Confederacy and Stone Mountain Park need to be divorced from each other.”

“There was a lot of anger,” when the changes were announced, Collard said. That’s not surprising, given that the mountain, Georgia’s biggest tourist attraction, elicits strong emotions from people on both sides of the argument for and against the monument.

The carving is currently protected, though, by Georgia law, which states that “the memorial to the heroes of the Confederate States of America graven upon the face of Stone Mountain shall never be altered, removed, concealed, or obscured in any fashion and shall be preserved and protected for all time as a tribute to the bravery and heroism of the citizens of this state who suffered and died in their cause.”

But it’s not just the carving, which depicts Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy during the Civil War, and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Streets in the park are named after the three, and next to the flags stands Confederate Hall, which has science exhibits, classrooms and documentaries about the war. A lake in the park is named after the family that owned it when the Ku Klux Klan met there regularly.

“You’re not going to be able to please everybody, but we are trying to at least come to some type of common ground where we can all get along,” said SMMA Chairman Rev. Abraham Mosley, the first Black man to lead the association.

Mosley has been friends with Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, for about 30 years, he said, and has known Kemp’s wife about 10 years more than that. Kemp asked him to chair the association, he said, and Mosley assumed the position last month.

“I’m happy with the start,” Mosley said of the changes at the park. “In order to walk a mile, you’ve got to take that first step. We’ve been in a rut for a long time.”

What cannot be overlooked is the financial impetus for change at Stone Mountain Park. Revenue fell about 60% last year, from about $59 million in 2019 to about $22 million in 2020, CEO Stephens said.

“It’s hard to quantify exactly a number,” of the loss the Confederacy issue is causing and what can be attributed to the Covid-19 pandemic, Stephens said.

“I can tell you that we’ve lost business from major corporations that used to do business with our hotels and come to the park for gatherings, that they no longer do so due to the Confederacy issue,” the CEO said.

Herschend Family Entertainment, the company that runs the entertainment and hotel operations at the park, has given notice that it’s pulling out of its decades-old partnership with the park as of August 2022, and Marriott, which operates two hotels at the park, is leaving at the same time, Stephens said.

“Part of the reason was the Confederacy issue, with some of the protests and other things that we’ve had here at the park,” Stephens said. “That creates economic reasons as well.”

The mountain was the site of many Ku Klux Klan meetings over the years from around 1915 until the state bought the property in 1958, the SMMA said this week, and it has since been a regular gathering place for White supremacist group rallies. And that brings groups that oppose them.

Some of these gatherings have been carefully managed, with police in riot gear separating opposing groups that included people openly carrying firearms. And some planned gatherings have moved the park to close altogether for the day.

Martin O’Toole, a spokesman for the Georgia division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, says that other entertainment venues suffered even more financially last year than the park did.

“Prior to Covid coming on, they weren’t having an attendance problem,” O’Toole said of the park. “So what I think they’re trying to do is, they’re trying to bootstrap Covid as an opportunity for them to censure.”

“The thing that I find most objectionable is their desire to contextualize the park, because Stone Mountain Memorial Park — Confederate Memorial Park is the full name of the statute — is protected by law,” O’Toole said. “What you have is a number of people who would like to get rid of it” but they can’t because it is protected by law.

The Georgia division of the SCV has a whole section of its website devoted to the park and its vision for a heritage park, something like Williamsburg, with actors in period costume and reenactors in uniform.

But as historians and critics point out, Stone Mountain’s history has nothing to do with the Civil War. No significant battles were fought there. The disputed carving was started in 1915 by Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor who went on to create Mount Rushmore. The carving was worked on off and on over the years, but it wasn’t finished until 1970.

“Those carvings relate to the fact that the Ku Klux Klan started meeting there,” said Rose. He pointed out that C. Helen Plane, a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy who proposed a Confederate monument on the mountain in 1915, had wanted members of the Klan depicted on the carving.

“Since seeing this wonderful and beautiful picture of Reconstruction in the South, I feel that it is due to the Ku Klux Klan which saved us from Negro domination and carpet-bag rule, that it be immortalized on Stone Mountain,” Plane wrote. “Why not represent a small group of them in their nightly uniform approaching in the distance?”

The idea for the carving came during the height of the “Lost Cause” period in Georgia. White Southerners argued that states’ rights, rather than slavery, was the impetus for the men in the carving to take up arms against the federal government during the Civil War.

For Mosley, who chairs the association tasked by state law with maintaining an “appropriate and suitable” memorial to the Confederacy, Stone Mountain would be “just a big rock” without the carving.

“So tell its story, the good and the bad,” Mosley said.

“Some of my folks want me to go out there with a bag of dynamite and blow it up, but that’s not the mountain that needs to be moved,” Mosley said. “The mountain that needs to be moved is skin color. That’s what we ought to be working on, moving that mountain.”

The supreme court of Virginia will this week hear arguments in legal challenges to Governor Ralph Northam’s plan to take down a 131-year-old statue of the Confederate general Robert E Lee, a move met with widespread praise from activists who had long seen it as a symbol of white supremacy.

A year after Northam’s announcement, the enormous bronze equestrian statue still towers over a traffic circle on Monument Avenue in downtown Richmond, kept in place by two lawsuits.

Among the central issues to be decided by the court whether the Commonwealth of Virginia is bound by a decision made by state officials more than 130 years ago, or can it undo that decision because the public’s attitude toward Confederate symbols has changed?

Attorneys for the plaintiffs will argue that the governor does not have the authority to remove the statue, while attorney general Mark Herring will ask the court to uphold a lower court’s rulings.

Northam’s decision to take down the statue was announced 10 days after George Floyd was murdered under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, during nightly protests over police brutality and racism around the country, including Richmond.

Separate lawsuits were filed by residents who own property near the statue and a descendant of signatories to a 1890 deed that transferred the statue, pedestal and land they sit on to the state.

In the latter lawsuit, William Gregory argues that the state agreed to “faithfully guard” and “affectionately protect” the statue.

The North Carolina Court of Appeals on Friday ordered the city of Asheville and Buncombe County to halt the demolition of a Confederate monument while an appeal plays out.

The city has already removed the 75-foot tall obelisk honoring Confederate colonel and Gov. Zebulon Vance from its base downtown but was still dismantling remaining portions.

The court's order specifies that the city and county must stop “any further action to deconstruct, demolish or remove the Zebulon Baird Vance Monument” pending an appeal filed by the Society for the Historical Preservation of the 26th North Carolina Troops, WLOS-TV reported.

Asheville and Buncombe County also must keep all the parts of the monument already taken down, the order said.

Workers have begun digging up the remains of a Confederate general, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and moving the former slave trader’s body from a park in Memphis, Tennessee, to a museum hundreds of miles away.

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Crews prepared to remove the graves of Forrest and his wife from Health Sciences Park in the busy medical district, a space which used to bear the name of Forrest, an early Ku Klux Klan leader, and a statue of the cavalryman on a horse.

Workers must dismantle the remaining pedestal before they can disinter the Forrests and move them to a Confederate museum. The process is expected to take weeks. The Sons of Confederate Veterans pressure group is overseeing the move, which a judge approved last year, ending a long legal battle.

Forrest sold enslaved people in Memphis and was a cavalry general. In April 1864, his troops attacked Fort Pillow in north-west Tennessee and killed between 200 and 300 Union soldiers, most of them Black. Northern newspaper reports called it an atrocity.

Historians say Forrest later became an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Many call him a violent racist.

The remains of Forrest and his wife were moved from a cemetery and buried under the statue in 1904. The city of Memphis took down the statue in December 2017 after selling the park to a non-profit group, circumventing a state law barring the removal of historic monuments from public areas. A judge in Nashville ruled that the city and Memphis Greenspace, the non-profit, acted legally.

The remains will be reburied and the statue placed at the National Confederate Museum at Elm Springs in Columbia, according to an affidavit from Bedford Forrest Myers, a great-great-grandson. Owned by the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, the museum opened in October. It is about 200 miles from Memphis.

A Confederate monument that was stolen and became the object of an odd ransom scheme is back in an Alabama cemetery where it stood for nearly 130 years — now glued to the ground for good measure — but who took the chair remains in dispute.

A Louisiana man charged in the odd disappearance of the chair-shaped monument surrendered to authorities Wednesday in what his lawyer called his first trip to the city where the alleged theft occurred.

Free on $30,000 bail after spending a couple hours in jail, Jason Warnick stood silently at a news conference as his attorney, Michael Kennedy, said the man was innocent of taking the chair, a monument to Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

“My client did not commit any theft,” Kennedy said.

District Attorney Michael Jackson said authorities believe Warnick or someone he knows found out about the chair during an annual tour of old homes held in Selma. Despite the defense denials, investigators say they have a photograph of Warnick with the chair.

“He did it,” Jackson said.

Placed at Live Oak Cemetery in 1893 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the chair vanished from its base earlier this year in Selma, a city widely known as the site of civil rights protests in the 1960s.

An email purporting to be from a group called White Lies Matter claimed responsibility and said the chair would be returned only if the United Daughters of the Confederacy agreed to display a banner at its Virginia headquarters in Richmond bearing a quote from a Black Liberation Army activist. The email also included images of a fake chair with a hole cut in the seat like a toilet and a man dressed in Confederate garb.

Authorities who arrested Warnick said the real chair was spotted at his tattoo parlor in New Orleans, where he is charged with receiving stolen property.

Warnick was accompanied at the news conference by girlfriend Kathryn Diionno, who also is charged with receiving stolen property. She could face additional charges in Alabama, authorities have said.

The chair, which the United Daughters of the Confederacy has valued at $500,000, has been returned to the cemetery and sits in its original location. A thick adhesive now holds its four legs to its brick base.

Warnick has no ties to White Lies Matter or any other activist group, Kennedy said. Longtime Selma activists Hank Sanders, a former Alabama state senator, and wife Faya Toure said the arrests of Warnick, Diionno and a third person highlight the racial inequality of Selma. In contrast to their diligent efforts to find the Confederate monument’s thief, prosecutors often fail to punish crimes against Black people, they said.