Baltimore: ALL Confederate Statues Have Now Been Removed

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The Village of Malverne will be unveiling a new name for a downtown street Thursday that, for the past century, has carried one from a village founder and leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Malverne Village Board unanimously voted in September to rename Lindner Place as Acorn Way, with the sign-changing ceremony taking place Thursday.

The street had been originally named for Paul Lindner, a village founder who was also known as a grand cyclops for the KKK. The street runs past the Malverne Library and the Maurice W. Downing Primary School, formerly known as Lindner Elementary, and one of the first schools integrated in New York to accept Black students.

A group of community members and Malverne High School students led the petition for the village to rename the street after exposing Lindner’s history of cross burnings and KKK rallies on Long Island and Queens. Lindner sold his farm land to develop downtown Malverne, founded in 1921, and also served on the Malverne school board.

Malverne Mayor Keith Corbett said the village will add a plaque to commemorate the name change and its historical context.

I think it’s an amazing testament to our high school student and residents who raised facts came together and united as the community we are today,” Corbett said. “This was a long time coming. We want to show how this came to be and not repeat past mistakes.”

Malverne Superintendent Lorna Lewis quoted Martin Luther King Jr. in ushering in the renaming, saying: “The time is always right to do what’s right.”

“I am thrilled this has finally come to fruition,” Lewis said. “After all these years that have allowed this name to stand, the community is doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”

The village voted to rename the street following research and a presentation about Lindner’s history. They also formed a renaming committee to settle on Acorn Way. Village officials said they had to order new signs and notify the U.S. Postal Service for routes and maps.

Lewis said the school has requested the old Lindner Place sign to hang in the elementary school’s library. She said high school art students are working on a children’s book to teach younger students about the renaming effort and the village history.

Some community members had accused the village of trying to erase history, but Lewis said it is important to preserve the past to remind people of what happened.

That's good news to hear sir, unfortunately where I tend to live, one of the nearby counties is putting back a confederate monument in the site of the county commission. Complete ass backwards and trying to maintain racism & bigotry. Though I don't live in this particular county nevertheless it pisses me of greatly to have read this.

For more than 80 years, Morgan State University students walking down Hillen Road near the school’s entrance saw a massive red brick wall. Some thought it was a simple alley; others thought perhaps it protected a few garages. But the structure was actually a “spite wall” intended to keep Black students from venturing into a once predominantly white Baltimore neighborhood.

White Baltimore residents banded together in the late 1930s to erect the wall in response to the growing number of Black people in the area attending Morgan State, a historically Black institution. On Tuesday, University President David Wilson, school officials and residents watched as an excavator destroyed the barrier.

“We had no choice but to tear it down,” Wilson said in an interview. “We couldn’t have this symbol of hate staring down every single day. This was an easy decision for us. It was time for us to tear down that hate.”

The wall was built along Hillen Road in front of the school’s entrance and stretching past Northwood Shopping Center in the early 1940s after years of debate and opposition. Residents and neighborhood associations in the predominantly white city already had qualms with the school when it moved to its current location in 1917, Wilson said. The state’s decision to change what was then Morgan College from a private institution into a public one in 1939 to help Black people only “exacerbated” the racial strife, Wilson said. It happened as Baltimore began to adopt restrictive racial covenants limiting where Black people could live — Baltimore was among the first cities to adopt such practices.

The Baltimore Afro-American newspaper published articles chronicling the debate: College trustees called plans for the wall “discriminatory to Morgan College,” while Morris Macht, part of one of Maryland’s largest residential building companies at the time, denied that it had anything to do with race. Ultimately, a zoning board approved the wall, and construction began in 1942, according to the Afro-American.

“For the white community, this spite wall was to send a signal and to physically create a divider that would symbolize the segregation that they stood for,” said Dale Green, a professor and architectural historian at Morgan State. “They were not supportive of the integration of African Americans into the greater society. The wall was to fortify the whites from the Blacks.”

The barrier remained for decades, even as Morgan State students fought for civil rights in the 1960s, staging one of the nation’s first anti-segregation sit-ins at the Northwood Shopping Center across the street from the campus.

Over time, the history of the wall faded into obscurity, its original intent known only by a few. But Wilson said the university doesn’t plan to ignore the past now that the wall is gone. Instead, he said, officials plan to keep a small part of the wall in place as a historical marker where students can learn about its dark history.

Florida’s state Senate is considering a bill that would let people sue local governments and other parties over the removal of memorials or historical monuments, in the wake of efforts in the state to take down monuments to the Confederacy.

The bill would provide that any person or entity that “damages, defaces, destroys, or removes a monument or memorial” could be liable and made to pay for the impact on the historical marker.

The bill would also prohibit the placement of “a plaque, sign, picture, notice, or any other object used to convey information” near any monument or memorial that existed before 2022, according to the bill text.

The Republican-majority Community Affairs Committee within the state Senate approved the “Historical Monuments and Memorials Protection Act” 6-2 on Wednesday, advancing it further toward a floor vote in the chamber.

“What I like about these memorials in public places is that everybody has the opportunity to see who we were,” state Sen. Jonathan Martin (R), the bill’s sponsor, told the Orlando Sentinel

Fort Bragg shed its Confederate namesake Friday to become Fort Liberty in a ceremony some veterans said was a small but important step in making the U.S. Army more welcoming to current and prospective Black service members.

The change was the most prominent in a broad Department of Defense initiative, motivated by the 2020 George Floyd protests, to rename military installations that had been named after confederate soldiers.

The Black Lives Matter demonstrations that erupted nationwide after Floyd’s killing by a white police officer, coupled with ongoing efforts to remove Confederate monuments, turned the spotlight on the Army installations. A naming commission created by Congress visited the bases and met with members of the surrounding communities for input.

“We were given a mission, we accomplished that mission and we made ourselves better,” Lt. Gen. Christopher Donahue, the commanding general of the XVIII Airborne Corps and Fort Liberty, told reporters after the ceremony that made the name change official.

The North Carolina base was originally named in 1918 for Gen. Braxton Bragg, a Confederate general from Warrenton, North Carolina, who was known for owning slaves and losing key Civil War battles that contributed to the Confederacy’s downfall.

While other bases are being renamed for Black soldiers, U.S. presidents and trailblazing women, the North Carolina military installation is the only one not renamed after a person. Retired U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Ty Seidule said at a naming commission meeting last year that the new name was chosen because “liberty remains the greatest American value.”

“Fayetteville in 1775 signed one of the first accords declaring our willingness to fight for liberty and freedom from Great Britain,” said Donahue, referring to the city adjacent to the base. “Liberty has always been ingrained in this area.”

The cost to rename Fort Bragg — one of the largest military installations in the world by population — will total about $8 million, Col. John Wilcox said Friday. Most front-facing signage has been changed but the process is ongoing.

“The name changes, the mission does not change,” base spokesperson Cheryle Rivas said Friday.

Fort Polk in Louisiana will be the next installation to change its name June 13 to Fort Johnson, in honor of Sgt. William Henry Johnson. The naming commission's proposed changes must be implemented by Jan. 1.

Several military bases were named after Confederate soldiers during World War I and World War II as part of a “demonstration of reconciliation” with white southerners amid a broader effort to rally the nation to fight as one, said Nina Silber, a historian at Boston University.

“It was kind of a gesture of, ‘Yes, we acknowledge your patriotism,’ which is kind of absurd to acknowledge the patriotism of people who rebelled against a country,” she said.

The original naming process involved members of local communities, although Black residents were left out of the conversations. Bases were named after soldiers born or raised nearby, no matter how effectively they performed their duties. Gen. Bragg is widely regarded among historians as a poor leader who did not have the respect of his troops, Silbe

Four Confederate flags that flew for about 60 years at the base of a popular Stone Mountain Park walk-up trail have been moved ahead of the busy Memorial Day weekend.

The flags were transferred Tuesday within the Stone Mountain site to Valor Park, an alcove at the base of a giant carving of Confederate leaders in granite on the mountain’s northern face. The carving ― the world’s largest Confederate monument ― is not visible from the base of the trail, and now, neither are the flags.

“This is a great way to start the weekend,” said Brian Morris, a member of the Stone Mountain Action Coalition, which has pushed for reforms at the park and protested Confederate Memorial Day ceremonies there.

The Stone Mountain Memorial Association, the state authority that manages the park, decided to move the flags two years ago and since then has been criticized for the delay. Bill Stephens, the association’s CEO, said it took some time to prepare the area where the flags were relocated. The move had also been on hold while the association switched private management partners for the park’s attractions, hotels and conference centers.

“We just completed the place where we’re going to relocate them to,” Stephens said. “The fact that it happened during Memorial Day week is not a negative.”

More than 3 million people visit Stone Mountain Park every year and traffic spikes during the patriotic holidays, Stephens said. People come for many reasons, including hikes, the laser show projected on the carving and the shops in the Crossroads village, he said.

The Confederate flags, donated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, went up in the early 1960s. A United States flag and two Georgia flags still fly at the head of the walk-up trail.

Some hikers Thursday said there seemed to be fewer flags than before but that they’d never paid much attention.

In the two days after the flags were moved, Stephens said he only received one complaint, from a woman who seemed to understand the change by the end of their conversation.

A state law that protects Confederate monuments prevents the flags from being removed entirely but says they can be moved to an equally prominent location. The memorial association thinks Valor Park qualifies. It keeps the flags with other Confederate tributes that visitors view by choice while clearing them from a place where many people, especially those who come just to hike, were offended by their presence.

“This relocation will position the Confederate Flag Plaza in a space dedicated to Confederate War dead, with other existing statuary in Valor Memorial Park and gardens in a place of similar prominence to their prior location,” the association said in a statement.

Valor Park, the new location, predates the flags. It contains a statue of an unnamed Confederate soldier with a broken sword. The word “valor” is carved on a bench. Another engraved quote from Robert E. Lee reads: “There is a true glory and a true honor: The glory of duty done — the honor of the integrity of principle.”

People who walk along Memorial Lawn to view the carving can access Valor Park. The lawn also contains the flags of every Confederate state.

he Stone Mountain Action Coalition has advocated for other changes at the park, such as renaming Confederate Hall, streets named for Confederate leaders, and Venable Lake, named for the Klansman who sold the mountain to the state.

“We look forward to the roads and the lake and the building names to be changed as soon as possible also,” Morris said.

The Ku Klux Klan was reborn on Stone Mountain in 1915, about the time work began on the carving of Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. The carving stalled for decades and was eventually completed during the civil rights movement a century after the Civil War, as Georgia fought integration efforts.

Four Confederate flags that flew for about 60 years at the base of a popular Stone Mountain Park walk-up trail have been moved ahead of the busy Memorial Day weekend.

Seriously?? there are confederate flags flying in a national park??
How seriously dumb is that. What are they trying to do, scare tourists and black visitors from not setting foot in the park?

Its a privately owned theme park type park. Nothing to do with the National Park Service.

It centered on a mountain in Georgia carved into giant figures of Lee, Davis, and Stonewall Jackson, as a deliberate Confederate version of Mt. Rushmore. Been a family attraction for decades.

Its a privately owned theme park type park. Nothing to do with the National Park Service.

It centered on a mountain in Georgia carved into giant figures of Lee, Davis, and Stonewall Jackson, as a deliberate Confederate version of Mt. Rushmore. Been a family attraction for decades. So it does have a Confederate theme.

The State of Georgia owns Stone Mountain and the surrounding park, totaling some 3,200 acres. The state purchased this land beginning in 1958 in keeping with Governor Marvin Griffin’s 1954 campaign promise to complete the carving.

As part of the national campaign to change the names of U.S. Army installations to cut ties with Confederate figures in America, Louisiana’s Fort Polk was redesignated to Fort Johnson Tuesday morning.

The campaign includes renaming nine U.S. Army bases, including North Carolina’s Fort Bragg changed to Fort Liberty, Texas’ Fort Hood changed to Fort Cavazos and Georgia's Fort Benning changed to Fort Moore, among other changes.

Fort Polk was originally named after Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk, a Confederate commander.

Now, the Fort Johnson base is honored for Sgt. William Henry Johnson, an African American World War I Medal of Honor recipient who served in the all-Black 369th U.S Infantry Regiment.

“Sgt. William Henry Johnson embodied the warrior spirit, and we are deeply honored to bear his name at the Home of Heroes,” said Brig. Gen. David W. Gardner, commanding general of the Joint Readiness Training Center and Fort Polk, in the press release.

The North Carolina native served one tour of duty on the western edge of the Argonne Forest in France’s Champagne region from 1918-1919, and became one of the first Americans to be awarded France's highest award for valor, the French Croix de Guerre avec Palme.

According to the U.S. Department of Defense, former President Theodore Roosevelt called Johnson one of the five bravest Americans to serve in World War I.

After his death in July 1929, Johnson was awarded the Purple Heart in 1996, the Distinguished Service Cross in 2003, and most recently, the Medal of Honor in 2015.

More names are expected to be changed through the renaming campaign, including Georgia’s Fort Gordon changed to Fort Eisenhower to commemorate Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Virginia’s Fort A.P. Hill will be changed to honor Dr. Mary Edwards Walker.

Yeah, and I’m sure all the hate and racism will instantly be cured. What is it going to take to get through to people that statues are not racist—racism and hatred is found in the heart, and no attempt to whitewash history is going to change that fact.

it's probably who/what the statues represent. I think all of this falls under the broad category of "decolonization"

I am surprised nobody has targeted classical music yet? Imagine bopping to a tune that slave masters would have been humming as they were being abusive. Come to think of it organisers of public events already avoid playing Wagner due to his association with the Nazi regime.

So you're in favor of retaining Confederate Statues?