Bid to speed ouster of Lee icon denied

RICHMOND, Va. -- The mayor of Charlottesville, Va., on Friday called for an emergency meeting of state lawmakers to confirm the city's right to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, a request that was swiftly rejected by the governor.

Mayor Mike Signer said recent clashes over race and the Confederacy had turned "equestrian statues into lightning rods" and urged Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe to convene a special session of the General Assembly.

Signer's statement came nearly a week after white supremacists descended on the city and violently clashed with counterprotesters. One woman was killed last Saturday when a car plowed into a crowd there to condemn what is believed to be the largest gathering of white supremacists in a decade.

"We can, and we must, respond by denying the Nazis and the KKK and the so-called alt-right the twisted totem they seek," Signer said in a statement.

Charlottesville's plans to remove the statue are in the midst of a legal challenge. A law passed in 1998 forbids local governments from removing or damaging war monuments, but there remains legal ambiguity about whether that applies to statues erected before the law was passed.

McAuliffe spokesman Brian Coy said the governor won't call a special session while the issue is being decided in court.

"The governor hopes the court will rule in the city's favor soon and encourages Mayor Signer to focus on that important litigation rather than a redundant emergency session," Coy said.

McAuliffe signed an executive order Friday afternoon temporarily banning any public demonstrations at a monument in Richmond. Unlike the Charlottesville statue that sits in a city park, the Richmond monument to Lee is in the middle of a traffic circle on Monument Avenue, a heavily traveled boulevard.

Earlier Friday, the mother of a woman who was killed while protesting the rally said she won't talk to President Donald Trump because of comments he made after her daughter's death.

Speaking on ABC's Good Morning America, Susan Bro said she initially missed the first few calls to her from the White House. But she said "now I will not" talk to the president after a news conference in which Trump equated violence by white supremacists at the rally with violence by those protesting the rally.

"After what he said about my child, and -- it's not that I saw somebody else's tweets about him, I saw an actual clip of him at a press conference equating the protesters like Ms. Heyer with the KKK and the white supremacists," Bro said.

Bro's 32-year-old daughter, Heather Heyer, was killed and 19 others were injured when a car was driven into a crowd of demonstrators. An Ohio man, James Alex Fields Jr., faces murder and other charges. Charlottesville police announced five more felony charges -- two counts of malicious wounding and three counts of aggravated malicious wounding -- against Fields on Friday afternoon.

In the hours after Heyer's death, Trump drew criticism when he addressed the violence in broad strokes, saying he condemned "in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides."

Pressured by advisers, the president had softened his words on the dispute Monday but returned to his combative stance Tuesday -- insisting at a news conference at Trump Tower that "both sides" were to blame.

"You can't wash this one away by shaking my hand and saying I'm sorry," Bro said of the president. She also advised Trump to "think before you speak."

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Friday called racism "evil."

In his most extensive comments on race and diversity since last weekend's violence in Charlottesville, Tillerson said freedom of speech is sacrosanct but that those who promote hate poison the public discourse and damage the country.

"Hate is not an American value," he told interns and young State Department workers, including members of minority groups who were involved in special recruiting programs. "We do not honor, nor do we promote or accept hate speech in any form and those who embrace it poison our public discourse and they damage the very country that they claim to love."

"Racism is evil," Tillerson said. "It is antithetical to America's values, it is antithetical to the American idea."

In Maryland, a statue of the U.S. Supreme Court justice who wrote the 1857 Dred Scott decision that upheld slavery and denied citizenship to blacks was removed Friday from the grounds of the Statehouse.

The statue of Roger Taney was lifted away by a crane about 2 a.m. It was lowered into a truck and driven away to storage.

The bronze statue was erected in 1872, just outside the original front door of the Statehouse.

Three of the four voting members of the State House Trust voted by email Wednesday to move the statue. House Speaker Michael Busch, a Democrat who was one of the three who voted to remove it, wrote this week that the statue "doesn't belong" on the grounds.

Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, said this week that removing the statue of Taney in Annapolis was "the right thing to do." Republican Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford voted on behalf of the administration to remove the statue.

One member of the trust, Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller, criticized holding the vote without a public meeting.

"This was certainly a matter of such consequence that the transparency of a public meeting and public conversation should have occurred," Miller, a Democrat, wrote in a letter Thursday to Hogan.

While the statue's removal was not publicized, a couple of dozen onlookers watched as workers started the removal process shortly after midnight Thursday. Some witnesses cheered as the statue was lifted from its pedestal.

The statue was removed two days after Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh ordered the removal of four monuments from her city under the cover of night, including another statue of Taney.

Boston, meanwhile, prepared for a free-speech rally and planned counterprotests today. The city will deploy about 500 police officers to prevent possible violence, the mayor and police commissioner said Friday.

"We will not tolerate any misbehavior, violence or vandalism whatsoever," Police Commissioner William Evans said at a City Hall news conference.

The city granted permission for what organizers are calling a free-speech rally on Boston Common, but which some people fear is actually a white nationalist event similar to the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh pointed out that some of those invited to speak "spew hate." Kyle Chapman, who described himself on Facebook as a "proud American nationalist," said he will attend.

"They have the right to gather no matter how repugnant their views are," Walsh said. "We're going to respect their right of free speech. In return they must respect our city."

The Boston Free Speech Coalition said its rally has nothing to do with white nationalism, Nazism or racism and that the group is not affiliated with the organizers of the Charlottesville rally.

"While we maintain that every individual is entitled to their freedom of speech and defend that basic human right, we will not be offering our platform to racism or bigotry. We denounce the politics of supremacy and violence," the group said on its Facebook page.

Information for this article was contributed by Alan Suderman, Brian Witte, Matthew Lee and Mark Pratt of The Associated Press and by Mark Berman of The Washington Post.

A Section on 08/19/2017