Baltimore ‘Quietly’ Takes Down Four Confederate Statues After Charlottesville

(AP) – Onlookers cheered early Wednesday as crews carted away Confederate monuments in Baltimore, where city leaders vowed to remove four of them on public property following this weekend’s deadly violence in Virginia.

The swift removal came sooner than expected and began late Tuesday, Mayor Catherine Pugh told reporters. She watched as the statues were plucked from their pedestals, tethered to large cranes.

“I felt that the best way was to remove them overnight,” Pugh said, adding, “I thought that enough speeches have been made about this. I didn’t think I needed to do a big speech about why. … We were going to move quickly and quietly.”

The statue of Supreme Court Chief Roger Taney was taken down from its location in the Mount Vernon Place neighborhood before 2:30 a.m. Wednesday, reported NBC affiliate WBAL. Taney had authored the Dred Scott decision — the landmark 1857 Supreme Court ruling that said blacks were not considered American citizens and the federal government couldn’t regulate slavery.

About a half-hour later, crews began removing a monument of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas. J. “Stonewall” Jackson, WBAL reported. Given the monument’s size, that took about two hours, Pugh said.

Also removed in the city were the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument and the Confederate Women’s Monument.

The mayor could not immediately say where the statues were being brought, but that there are Confederate cemeteries in the state and nation where they could be reinstalled.

In their place, Pugh suggested, plaques could be erected explaining what used to be in those spots and why they were gone.

The movement to haul off Confederate symbols has gained momentum in the wake of a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, where a 32-year-old counter-protester was killed when a man plowed a car into a crowd. The white nationalists were protesting the planned removal of a Gen. Lee statue from Charlottesville’s Emancipation Park.

Last year, a commission in Baltimore started by the previous administration looked at the city’s four Confederacy-linked monuments to consider taking some of them down.

Pugh said she has also been working on the issue since June, when she met with New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who began the process this year of taking down four Confederate monuments in his city. He said he was motivated to do so after the 2015 killing of nine black churchgoers by a self-proclaimed white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina.

But after the Charlottesville rally Saturday, the Baltimore City Council this week approved completely destroying its Confederate symbols.