Confederate monuments vandalized across the South during George Floyd protests
Confederate monuments were vandalized in at least six Southern states as protests erupted over the death of George Floyd.
Floyd, a black man, died last week when a now-arrested Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for more than 8 minutes before he died.
His death prompted people across the country to call for justice and an end to police brutality in protests, McClatchy News reported. The violence and “looting” is being done by much smaller groups at the mostly peaceful gatherings, authorities told ABC News.
Demonstrators also marred some symbols of the Confederacy, which have long drawn contention, news outlets reported.
Damage across the South
In Alabama, the city of Birmingham on Monday started to take down its Confederate Soldiers & Sailors Monument, which had stood over the city for 115 years, McClatchy News reported. The removal process came after protesters this weekend toppled a similar statue in the city’s Linn Park.
In other parts of the region, statues and structures were left defaced.
In Virginia, “No More White Supremacy” and “Black Lives Matter” were among the messages scrawled on the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Richmond, The Washington Post reported.
Nearby, a fire was set at the United Daughters of the Confederacy headquarters early Sunday morning, according to the newspaper. The Richmond Fire Department on Twitter said it responded to the area and put out flames on the exterior of a building.
In the same state, a photo from The Virginian-Pilot appears to show toilet paper and graffiti strewn across a Confederate monument in Norfolk.
Scrawled messages were found on similar statues this weekend in Charleston, South Carolina, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, The Associated Press reported. A “suspect” was arrested in connection with vandalism at the University of Mississippi, according to The Oxford Eagle.
In North Carolina, shots were fired into the air after Black Lives Matter demonstrators and a Confederate group clashed in Salisbury, WBTV reported on Sunday. Two people were arrested in connection with the alleged incident, which happened near a Confederate monument, according to the TV station.
To the east, “anti-racist and anti-police” messages marked a Confederate statue on the state capitol grounds in Raleigh, The News & Observer reported.
History of contention
Confederate monuments in North Carolina and other states have been at the center of debates and protests.
Supporters of the statues have said they help preserve Civil War history. But others contend they are symbols of white supremacy.
Some of this weekend’s reported vandalism referenced race. Protesters across the country have brought attention to Floyd and other African Americans who died in encounters with police.
Several Confederate monuments were removed after 2017’s deadly confrontations in Charlottesville, Virginia, when white supremacists who came to the city to protest the removal of a Confederate statue were met by counter demonstrators.
Amid nights of unrest, demonstrators in 2018 brought down a statue of a Confederate soldier at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Last year, officials removed statues in the nearby cities of Pittsboro and Winston-Salem, McClatchy News reported.
Nationwide, the Southern Poverty Law Center tallied 777 Confederate monuments as of July 2019. That same year, about a dozen of the statues were vandalized in cities across the South, McClatchy News reported.
Most of the monuments went up “between the 1890s and 1950s, which matches up exactly with the era of Jim Crow segregation,” Mark Elliott, a history professor at University of North Carolina at Greensboro, told History.com.
This story was originally published June 2, 2020 at 2:54 PM with the headline "Confederate monuments vandalized across the South during George Floyd protests."
