Mayor of the Baltimore wants to remove all the monuments from the Confederacy, following footsteps of the New Orleans. Catherine Pugh told to the Baltimore Sun that the city could save money by the way of monuments auctioning.
“The city does want to remove these. We will take a closer look at how we go about following in the footsteps of New Orleans,” Pugh said.
New Orleans has recently removed the three prominent statues of Confederate figures, which are of President Jefferson Davis and also two generals, PGT Beauregard and also Robert E Lee, and a monument of heralding white supremacy. The statue removals were mostly carried out overnight and also with the strict security, attracted to the protests and also some arrests but not the widespread unrest as some feared.
“You name it,” Pugh said of Baltimore’s plans, “we’ve tackled it. This is another one of those things that we will tackle as well. New Orleans has taken on this issue. It costs about $200,000 a statute to tear them down … Maybe we can auction them?”
A commission, which was appointed by the former Baltimore mayor recommended in removing a monument of Roger B Taney, a Marylander who wrote the ruling of supreme court in 1856 Dred Scott which denied citizenship to the African Americans, and also a statue of two Virginians, the Confederate generals Lee and also Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
The Roger B Taney Monument is located on the Mount Vernon Place, while the Lee and also Jackson monument is in the Wyman Park Dell.
Citing at cost concerns, the former mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake has left the decision to her successor, settling for the erection of signs on the statues and also other monuments which described “a propaganda campaign of national pro-Confederate organizations to perpetuate the beliefs of white supremacy, falsify history and support segregation and racial intimidation”.
The commission was appointed by Rawlings-Blake after the fatal shootings in the June 2015 of nine parishioners at the South Carolina African American church by a gunman, who posted the pictures of himself along with the Confederate battle flag.
In some of the states, partisan feelings over the removal of the New Orleans statues and monuments has run high. In this week, In a social media post, a Mississippi lawmaker said that anyone seeking to “destroy historical monuments of OUR HISTORY … should be LYNCHED!”
Later, the social media post was taken down.
The New Orleans’ mayor, Mitch Landrieu, told to NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that: “If we take down the monuments and don’t take away the attitude that put the monuments up or that allowed them to stay there, we really wouldn’t have done much as a country.And so hopefully, the people of New Orleans will use this as an opportunity to reach into our past, tell our whole history, and then prepare for the future in a way that makes sense to us.”
The support for statues is expected be less fiercely expressed in Maryland than in the southern states such as Louisiana, although the national pro-Confederate groups protested the removals by New Orleans.
Mrudula Duddempudi.
