More Confederate Monuments Are Coming Down

Cities across America, fearing that they could become the site of the next Charlottesville-style confrontation between white supremacists and their opponents, are stepping up efforts to get rid of Confederate monuments. Four monuments were taken down in Baltimore overnight Tuesday in a surprise move ordered by the mayor, and cities including Richmond, Va., the former Confederate capital, are considering similar moves. More:

• Levar Stoney, Richmond's Democratic mayor, says he's had a change of heart about the Confederate statues lining Monument Avenue, the Washington Post reports. He says he once favored adding interpretive material and letting them stay, but he now sees that they could be a "rallying point for division and intolerance and violence." "These monuments should be part of our dark past and not of our bright future," he says. "I personally believe they are offensive and need to be removed."

• Confederate monuments have been vandalized this week in cities such as Knoxville, Tenn., and Wilmington, NC, where police say statues were sprayed with paint, the AP reports. Somebody also put a rope around one of the Wilmington statues in an apparent attempt to topple it. In Durham, NC, four people have been arrested over the toppling of a Confederate statue earlier this week.
• The New York Times has a guide to where Confederate statues are being taken down or have already come down across the country, including Gainesville, Fla., where "Old Joe" was moved to a private cemetery this week after 113 years in front of a city government building.
• New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says busts of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and Lt. Gen Stonewall Jackson will be removed from City University of New York's Hall of Fame for Great Americans, CNN reports. He says the Confederates are not "worthy of a spot in this great hall." Cuomo says he has also asked the Army to reconsider its refusal to rename General Lee Avenue and Stonewall Jackson Drive at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn.
• The city council in Lexington, Ky., is due to vote Thursday night on the removal of two Confederate statues from outside the old courthouse, the Herald-Leader reports. White nationalists say they plan to hold a rally against relocation.
• The Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles has removed a monument to Confederate soldiers from the Pacific region, although their grave markers will remain, NBC Los Angeles reports. Officials say the monument, owned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, had become a target for vandals in recent weeks.
• According the Southern Poverty Law Center, there are around 1,500 Confederate monuments in public spaces in the US. But not all of them are historic, the Guardian notes: Thirty-two of them were dedicated or rededicated after 2000.

(More Confederacy stories.)