BALTIMORE -- Baltimore's mayor said Wednesday that she was acting in the "best interest of my city" when she ordered the removal overnight of statues dedicated to Confederate heroes, days after violence broke out during a rally against the removal of a similar monument in neighboring Virginia.
"I said with the climate of this nation that I think it's very important that we move quickly and quietly," Mayor Catherine Pugh said.
With no immediate public notice, no fundraising, and no plan for a permanent location for the monuments once they had been excised, Pugh watched in the wee hours Wednesday as contractors with cranes protected by a contingent of police officers lifted the monuments from their pedestals and rolled them away on flatbed trucks.
Many cities and their residents in recent days have called for their Confederate monuments to come down, citing Saturday's violent clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters over a Robert E. Lee statue that is set for removal in Charlottesville. Three people died in connection with last weekend's violence.
Seeking to remove such monuments typically sets in motion a bureaucratic process that, in cities like Charlottesville, tends to face legal delays that help fuel tensions surrounding the matter.
But, in an interview, Pugh suggested that the tense political climate had turned her city's statues into a security threat, and she said her emergency powers allowed her to have them removed immediately.
"The mayor has the right to protect her city," she said. "For me, the statues represented pain, and not only did I want to protect my city from any more of that pain, I also wanted to protect my city from any of the violence that was occurring around the nation."
Small, celebratory crowds gathered as the monuments were removed overnight. Residents were seen celebrating by the pedestal of a monument to Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, two Confederate generals, which had been spray-painted with the phrase "Black Lives Matter." The mayor had moved so swiftly that even some members of Baltimore's City Council were unaware of it.
Pugh said she did not know where the statues were taken or where they will end up. She suggested that plaques be installed that describe "what was there and why it was removed."
Pugh said she did not anticipate a legal challenge but that the city would fight any such lawsuit.
"I don't think it would matter, because I think having consulted with my legal team I acted in the best interest of my city," she said.
MONUMENTS ELSEWHERE
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said Wednesday that he'd changed his mind on the need to remove Confederate statues in his state -- saying in a statement that monuments of Confederate leaders have become "flashpoints for hatred, division and violence."
In his statement, he encouraged local governments and the General Assembly to take down those monuments and put them in museums.
McAuliffe previously said he did not think the monuments needed to be removed.
In Brooklyn, N.Y., plaques honoring Lee were removed Wednesday from the now-closed grounds of St. John's Episcopal Church. Also, New York's governor called on the Army to remove the names of Lee and another Confederate general from the streets of a nearby fort.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo wrote to acting Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy saying renaming Stonewall Jackson Drive and General Lee Avenue is especially important after the events in Charlottesville. "Symbols of slavery and racism have no place in New York," he said.
Lee and Jackson both spent time at Fort Hamilton, N.Y., well before the hostilities of the Civil War. The streets at the fort aren't readily accessible to the general public.
In Los Angeles, a stone monument at Hollywood Forever Cemetery commemorating Confederate veterans was taken down Wednesday after hundreds of people demanded its removal.
The 6-foot granite marker had stood since 1925 in a section of the famous Los Angeles graveyard where more than 30 Confederate veterans and their families are buried. It was loaded onto a pickup and taken to a storage site.
On Tuesday, North Carolina's Gov. Roy Cooper wrote in an editorial on the online news site Medium that his state needs to remove hundreds of Confederate monuments from places of reverence across the state.
North Carolina has hundreds of them, Cooper wrote, and each has the potential to become a flash point for emotional and potentially violent debates about history, heritage and racial bias.
In Durham, N.C., on Monday, protesters toppled a 15-foot statue of a Confederate soldier that had stood in front of the Durham County courthouse since 1924.
Also Tuesday, the City Council in Lexington, Ky., voted to move forward on a proposal to remove two Confederate statues from the lawn of the historic Fayette County Courthouse, the Lexington Herald-Leader reported.
However, in Alabama, the state attorney general sued the city of Birmingham and its mayor Wednesday for obscuring a Confederate monument in a downtown park, citing a state law that protects such markers.
The law, passed earlier this year, prohibits the removal of historical structures, including Confederate memorials. So Birmingham Mayor William Bell ordered the city's 52-foot-tall Confederate obelisk in Linn Park Memorial covered with wooden panels.
In Arkansas, Chris Powell, a spokesman for the secretary of state's office, said this week that office officials weren't aware of any threats to the state's two Confederate monuments on the state Capitol grounds. He said Capitol police regularly watch for any vandalism.
In Arkansas, 21 Confederate monuments are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, according to the Department of Arkansas Heritage. Most sit near county courthouses or in old town squares.
Information for this article was contributed by Nicholas Fandos, Russell Goldman and Jess Bidgood of The New York Times; by Cleve R. Wootson Jr. of The Washington Post; by Deepti Hajela and staff members of The Associated Press; and by Hunter Field of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
A Section on 08/17/2017