The Chumph’s only Hotel in Latin America has removed the Chumph’s name…
The joint has been a magnet for criminal elements and money laundering operations.for the Chumph’s mob and Russian Mafia associates.
Tag Archives: removal
Memphis Plays “Whack a Reb” Around Republican State Racists
Nice move, Memphis!
In a rapidly emerging war between municipalities, the Trump administration and white-wing, neo fascist Republican dominated legislators opposed to local rule…
Another mile marker.
Memphis takes bold legal action to circumvent Tennessee state rule and remove Confederate statues
The city of Memphis engaged in a “massive operation” on Wednesday to take down two controversial Confederate statues before the morning light, the Commercial Appealreports.
The Memphis City Council first unanimously voted to sell two public parks to a private entity. Within minutes, Memphis Police Department officers had deployed to the sites of statues honoring Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest and Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Within one hour of the vote, Mayor Jim Strickland had signed the ordinance.
The sale of the parks was a legal mechanism to circumvent a decision by the Tennessee Historical Commission intended to prevent local governments from taking down the statues.
“Health Sciences Park and Memphis Park have been sold. Operations on those sites tonight are being conducted by a private entity and are compliant with state law,” Mayor Strickland explained. “We will have further updates later tonight.”
Republican Candidate Child Rapist Adds Another Accuser
Most pedopiles actually molest several hudred children before they are caught.I never is a “I did it once” for the Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Roy More type of serial molester/rapist – they harm dozens if not hundreds.
That the folks in Alabama are defending this scumbag is a national disgrace. General Sherman obviously burned the wrong state during the Civil War.
Fifth Woman Comes Forward With Charges Against Roy Moore, Republicans Threaten Expulsion
Another woman has charged Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore of sexually assaulting her.
In an emotional news conference, Beverly Young Nelson said Moore groped her and tried to force her head onto his crotch in his car behind the restaurant where the then 16 year old worked.
Nelson, appearing alongside attorney Gloria Allred, said the incident occurred in 1977.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday, “I believe the women” and called on Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama to “step aside.”
McConnell made his remarks at a news conference in Kentucky. Moore has been accused of initiating sexual contact with a 14-year-old in 1979 when he was 32. Four other women have accused Moore of inappropriate contact when they were teens — one of whom came forward publicly on Monday.
McConnell had initially said last week Moore should end his candidacy “if” the allegations were true. McConnell had supported the incumbent senat
Luther Strange, in the primary. He said a write-in campaign for Strange is now “an option.”
Moore has come under increasing pressure from GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill to step aside prior to the Dec. 12 special election in Alabama. He has refused, saying the accusations were “false and untrue” and threatening to sue The Washington Post, which first reported the storyon Nov. 9.
Moore responded to McConnell via Twitter, saying McConnell “has failed conservatives and must be replaced.”
The person who should step aside is @SenateMajLdr Mitch McConnell. He has failed conservatives and must be replaced. #DrainTheSwamp
The National Republican Senatorial Committee has pulled out of a joint fundraising agreement with Moore, and the list of prominent Republicans opposing Moore’s candidacy has steadily grown.
The most recent is Maine’s Sen. Susan Collins, who in a statement on Twitter Monday said she “did not find Moore’s denials to be convincing.”
I have now read Mr. Moore’s statement and listened to his radio interview in which he denies the charges. I did not find his denials to be convincing and believe that he should withdraw from the Senate race in Alabama.
Republican leaders in Alabama, however, have largely defended Moore. Alabama State Auditor Jim Zeigler said there is “just nothing immoral or illegal” about the allegations and compared them to biblical marriages. The comments drew criticism from some evangelical leaders.
Meanwhile, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey has called the allegations against Moore “deeply disturbing,” but on Monday she said, “I will withhold judgment until we get more of the facts,” according to WSFA in Alabama.
Monday afternoon, another woman charged Moore with assaulting her. Beverly Young Nelson appeared at a news conference alongside attorney Gloria Allred. Nelson said when she was 16, Moore groped her and tried to force her head onto his crotch in his car behind the restaurant where she worked in Alabama.
Moore’s campaign chairman Bill Armistead released a statement calling Allred “a sensationalist leading a witch hunt,” adding that Moore “is an innocent man and have never had any sexual misconduct with anyone.”
Following Nelson’s accusation, NRSC Chairman Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., issued a statement:
“I believe the individuals speaking out against Roy Moore spoke with courage and truth, proving he is unfit to serve in the United States Senate and he should not run for office. If he refuses to withdraw and wins, the Senate should vote to expel him, because he does not meet the ethical and moral requirements of the United States Senate.”
These confederate Monuments
Turns out, the State with the most confederate Memorials is my home State, Virginia. Some of the Historical reasons is tha a good part of the Civil War was fought here, a number of the key military Generals (Lee, Jackson, Stuart) were Virginians, and the fact that Richmond was the Capital of the confederacy. The descendants of those families still live here.There has been a push to remove the Monuments or rename buildings and roads named after them through the years – but the connection to Virginia born people tends to moderate the responses from both sides. At least it did until Charlottesville where a bunch of outsiders came in in their Nazi gear to wreak havoc.
One of those dots on the map is near where I live, and I have seen the monument. It is to the local soldiers who died in the “War Between the States”. The fact that they all fought as confederates, well…Is what it is.The family names of those guys live on today as part of the local population. Hard for me, at least, to work up any ire over this. Let it be.
The State was as segregated under Jim Crow as any in the South. Let it be. You can get a confederate license plate in Virginia by joining the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Let it be.
There is a historical context in Virginia because that is where a large part of the war was, and that was where these folks fought. There simply is no relevance to a Lee, Jackson, or Stuart statue in any state other than Virginia, Maryland (Antietam), and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania where they fought. In Virginia at several of the Battlefields there are still bullets, cannonballs, and bones lightly buried in the battlefields where they fought.So this is part of our living history.
So I am not sure all of these need to come down – and support moving some to historically significant places. You want to move those confederate generals from Monument Avenue in Richmond to the Battlefields at Bull Run, Manassas, Fredericksburg, or Cold Harbor…I won’t object at all.
So what I am arguing here is a common-sense approach…Although I still never expect to see a statue of Sherman in Georgia.
Virginia’s 204 confederate Monuments and Memorials
Symbols of the Confederacy still dot the South
Highest density
Virginia, the birthplace of Robert E. Lee, is home to more than 220 Confederate symbols, including three military bases named for Confederate war heroes. Texas and Georgia have the second- and third-most symbols, at 178 and 163, respectively.
confederate Monuments in the US
Schools
109 public schools are named for Confederate icons, including Gens. Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart, and the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis. Of these schools, nearly 25 percent have a student body that is primarily black, while almost a tenth of the schools have a student body that is more than 90 percent black.
Monuments and statues
Of the more than 700 statues and monuments, more than 25 percent are located in Virginia and Georgia alone. Texas, South Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi combined make up an additional 30 percent. Nearly 77 percent were built or dedicated before 1950, while 6 percent were built or rededicated during the era of the civil rights movement. Four percent were built or rededicated after the year 2000.
Roads, highways and bridges
From General Lee Avenue in Brooklyn, New York, to Jefferson Davis Highway in San Diego, California, nearly 500 roads, highways and bridges memorialize the Confederacy.
Counties and cities
There are 80 counties and cities named for Confederates, including Fort Davis, Texas, and Lee County, North Carolina, among others.
In Flash Move Baltimore Removes confederate Statues
Take ’em down.
Baltimore Removes Confederate Statues One Day After Voting On Issue
In an overnight operation, workers removed Baltimore’s high-profile statues linked to the Confederacy, using cranes and trucks to haul away monuments that honored Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Roger B. Taney, author of the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott opinion.
“It’s done,” Mayor Catherine Pugh said Wednesday, according to The Baltimore Sun. “They needed to come down. My concern is for the safety and security of our people. We moved as quickly as we could.”
The city took action as several local groups were preparing their own plans to yank down the statues, in much the same way a Confederate statue was taken down in Durham, N.C., this week.
The organization Coalition of Friends/Tubman House, which had helped to plan a “Do It Like Durham” event for Wednesday using the tagline, “Let’s tear down white supremacy and hate,” says it canceled the event after the statues were removed.
A grassroots coalition that had promoted the event, the Baltimore Bloc, used its Twitter feed to post videos of the statues being taken down on.
The statues have been removed nearly a year after a mayoral commission recommended taking down the public commemorations to Taney at Mount Vernon Place and to Lee and Jackson, who were depicted together on horseback in a monument in the Wyman Park Dell.
That commission had recommended keeping two other artifacts: the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Mount Royal Avenue near Mosher Street and the Confederate Women’s of Maryland Monument at Bishop Square Park. But in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend, the city council voted to remove all four monuments.
Councilman Brandon Scott introduced the city’s measure, which called for “the immediate deconstruction of all Confederate Monuments in Baltimore so that they are unable to be placed on public display.”
A photo taken at the scene of the Taney monument Tuesday night shows an information placard titled “Reconciling History.” Behind it, the statue’s pedestal stands empty.
As NPR’s Colin Dwyer reports, the deadly violence in Charlottesville has given new momentum to many cities and states that are pushing to remove monuments to Confederate figures from prominent display.
Adding to the controversy, President Trump has made a series of statements about the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville that confused and angered many in the public and in the Republican Party.
Trump initially refused to assign blame for an act that resulted in a murder charge, prompting a flood of criticism. He then called out hate groups on Monday — but on Tuesday, the president reiterated his view that “there’s blame on both sides.”
Millions of Marylanders fought in the Civil War — and nearly three times as many fought for the Union than for the Confederacy. But as the mayoral commission noted, “Baltimore has three public monuments to the Confederacy and only one to the Union.”
The Push for Equity vs Equality in Charlotteville, Va
This starts off with the neo-confederate whine about the removal of yet another statue to treason…And ends up with an interesting interview of the only black City Councilman, Wes Bellamy.
He discusses the difference between “equity” and “Equality”.
It is Time to Remove Sessions
It is time for Congress to take up the issue of the removal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The legal basis for doing so is comprehensive –
- Jeff Sessions perjured himself in testimony about his Russian meetings before Congress
- There is is direct evidence of multiple meetings between Sessions and Trump’s Russian ally on at least 2 occasions, and possibly 3-4. None of these meetings as Sessions has claimed (again – perjury) had anything to do with his role as Senator
- Sessions stonewalled Congress using the legally non-existent justification of his non-existent Executive Privilege in testimony this week. For the Attorney General to use an unconstitutional and illegal tactic to cover up in testimony is another form of perjury
- Sessions was part of the Chumph’s team decision to fire Comey, violating his statement of “recusal” from the Trump-Russia collusion investigation
Democrats should make Sessions removal an absolute priority, and should be using any method necessary to short circuit Sessions dismantling og Civil Rights and along with it Voting Rights.
The Sessions is doing his best to protect his white supremacist and KKK favorites.
Trump administration quietly rolls back civil rights efforts across federal government
or decades, the Department of Justice has used court-enforced agreements to protect civil rights, successfully desegregating school systems, reforming police departments, ensuring access for the disabled and defending the religious.
Now, under Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the DOJ appears to be turning away from this storied tool, called consent decrees. Top officials in the DOJ civil rights division have issued verbal instructions through the ranks to seek settlements without consent decrees — which would result in no continuing court oversight.
The move is just one part of a move by the Trump administration to limit federal civil rights enforcement. Other departments have scaled back the power of their internal divisions that monitor such abuses. In a previously unreported development, the Education Department last week reversed an Obama-era reform that broadened the agency’s approach to protecting rights of students. The Labor Department and the Environmental Protection Agency have also announced sweeping cuts to their enforcement.
“At best, this administration believes that civil rights enforcement is superfluous and can be easily cut. At worst, it really is part of a systematic agenda to roll back civil rights,” said Vanita Gupta, the former acting head of the DOJ’s civil rights division under President Barack Obama.
Consent decrees have not been abandoned entirely by the DOJ, a person with knowledge of the instructions said. Instead, there is a presumption against their use — attorneys should default to using settlements without court oversight unless there is an unavoidable reason for a consent decree. The instructions came from the civil rights division’s office of acting Assistant Attorney General Tom Wheeler and Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Gore. There is no written policy guidance.
Devin O’Malley, a spokesperson for the DOJ, declined to comment for this story.
Consent decrees can be a powerful tool, and spell out specific steps that must be taken to remedy the harm. These are agreed to by both parties and signed off on by a judge, whom the parties can appear before again if the terms are not being met. Though critics say the DOJ sometimes does not enforce consent decrees well enough, they are more powerful than settlements that aren’t overseen by a judge and have no built-in enforcement mechanism.
Such settlements have “far fewer teeth to ensure adequate enforcement,” Gupta said.
Consent decrees often require agencies or municipalities to take expensive steps toward reform. Local leaders and agency heads then can point to the binding court authority when requesting budget increases to ensure reforms. Without consent decrees, many localities or government departments would simply never make such comprehensive changes, said William Yeomans, who spent 26 years at the DOJ, mostly in the civil rights division.
“They are key to civil rights enforcement,” he said. “That’s why Sessions and his ilk don’t like them.”…
On March 31, Sessions ordered a sweeping review of all consent decrees with troubled police departments nationwide to ensure they were in line with the Trump administration’s law-and-order goals. Days before, the DOJ had asked a judge to postpone a hearing on a consent decree with the Baltimore Police Department that had been arranged during the last days of the Obama administration. The judge denied that request, and the consent decree has moved forward.
The DOJ has already come under fire from critics for altering its approach to voting rights cases. After nearly six years of litigation over Texas’ voter ID law — which Obama DOJ attorneys said was written to intentionally discriminate against minority voters and had such a discriminatory effect — the Trump DOJ abruptly withdrew its intent claims in late February….More…
Baltimore’s confederate Statues
Baltimore, a city in a state that never was part of the Confederacy (not for lack of trying) has 3 confederate monuments. It is a majority black city.
So…the problem I have with Miz Mayor is…WTF is the problem?
It don’t cost $200k to take those down. You call a metal recycling outfit, and they can have the bronze statues for the cost of hauling them away to melt down. Frontloader and Dump truck, a couple of guys with jackhammers take care of the base – cost $3000 if you have to rent the truck. End of story. Alternately keep the base to put something of value to the folks of Baltimore on top of.
Get the feeling that perhaps the reason for Baltimore’s continuing struggles are their lousy leadership?
Mayor Catherine Pugh
Baltimore Mayor Considers Removal Of Confederate Monuments
Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh is considering the removal of her city’s Confederate monuments, as New Orleans did just days ago.
“The city does want to remove these,” Pugh told the Baltimore Sun. “We will take a closer look at how we go about following in the footsteps of New Orleans.”
Earlier this month, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu delivered a speech that drew widespread attention, explaining why he had ordered the removal of that city’s confederate monuments.
Among Baltimore’s monuments to the Confederacy is a statue of Roger Taney, the Supreme Court chief justice who wrote the infamous Dred Scott decision that said, among other things, that African-Americans could not be citizens. The city also has statues of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
A statue of Chief Justice Roger Taney in Baltimore, Md.
Pugh suggested one way to get rid of the statues, telling the Sun, “It costs about $200,000 a statute to tear them down. … Maybe we can auction them?”
The previous mayor of Baltimore, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, ordered the placement of interpretive plaques at the monuments. One such plaque, placed at a statue of Lee and Jackson, states:
“These two men became subjects of the Lost Cause movement which portrayed them as Christian soldiers and even as men who opposed slavery. Today current scholarship refutes these claims. These larger-than-life representations of Lee and Jackson helped perpetuate the Lost Cause ideology, which advocated for white supremacy, portrayed slavery as benign and justified secession.”
Carolyn Billups, former president of the Maryland chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, told the Sun, “I find it interesting that Baltimore city has that kind of money to move statues when there are problems with crime and schools. I would think that would be more of a priority.”
Don’t Want Your Stinkin’ Trump Name On Our Building!
The Chumph Brand is dead.
‘Trump Place’ Apartments Ditch Their Name After Residents Protest
A petition got hundreds of signatures.
Three New York City apartment buildings are removing Donald Trump’s name from their exteriors after residents started a “Dump the Trump” petition.
Workers were seen taking down the big gold “Trump Place” letters from one of the three buildings on the Upper West Side of Manhattan Wednesday morning.
The “Dump the Trump Name” petition, while not confirmed as the direct cause of the change, gathered 677 signatures after it was launched about a month ago.
“It’s nuts that we’re now living in a place that is advertising values that none of us believe in,” petition co-author Linda Gottlieb told CNBC. The petition cited Trump’s “appalling treatment of women, his history of racism, his attacks on immigrants, his mockery of the disabled, his tax avoidance, his outright lying,” that the name insults many of the minorities and immigrants who work in the building, and that the naming deal increases Trump’s net worth.
The three buildings were under contract to bear Trump’s name for a time, but that contract has ended, according to Marty McKenna, a spokesman for the buildings’ landlord, Equity Residential. The buildings will now be called simply by their Riverside Drive street addresses instead.
“Assuming a more neutral building identity will appeal to all current and future residents,” McKenna told HuffPost.
Donna Brazile …Time to Go
It is time for Donna Brazile to go, she has crossed the line one too many times, and at this point is doing nothing to help the Democrat Party.
She is just one of the “old line” which need to leave so the Party can move forward with a progressive agenda…And start winning office again against the racist Republican Party.
For the good of the party: It’s time for Donna Brazile to go
It’s time for Donna Brazile to go.
Like Debbie Wasserman Schultz before her, Brazile has lost credibility as an honest broker at the Democratic National Committee. The DNC chair should be evenhanded — but, thanks to leaked emails, Brazile’s cover is blown.
At the same time that Brazile was publicly claiming to be neutral in the fierce Clinton-Sanders primary battle, she was using her job as a CNN political analyst to give the Clinton campaign advance notice of questions that would be asked during a CNN debate between the two candidates.
Yet Brazile seems tone deaf about her integrity breach — just as the Democratic Party establishment has been tone deaf about the corrosive effects of servicing Wall Street and wealthy contributors.
As the Washington Post reported a week ago, “Donna Brazile is not apologizing for leaking CNN debate questions and topics to the Hillary Clinton campaign during the Democratic primary. Her only regret, it seems, is that she got caught.”
Consider Brazile’s response after the email hack exposed the chasm between her public claims of being evenhanded and her furtive effort to help Clinton gain an improper debate advantage over Sanders. “My conscience, as an activist, as a strategist — my conscience is very clear,” Brazile said in a radio interview, adding that “if I had to do it all over again, I would know a hell of a lot more about cybersecurity.”
But the current DNC chair’s lack of encryption knowledge is hardly the problem. Brazile has functioned as a shameless cog in the Clinton political machine.
That machine hasn’t just broken down; it is now kaput. In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory, the DNC must undergo a far-reaching shakeup. And — with no time to waste — we can’t wait several months until Brazile’s planned departure from the DNC chair job in March.
That’s why several hundred activists who were Bernie Sanders delegates to the Democratic National Convention just voted to “call for the immediate resignation of Donna Brazile as chair of the Democratic National Committee.”
A lopsided tally came in over the weekend, with 96 percent — 337 to 13 — in favor of pushing for Brazile to resign. The straw poll was conducted by the Bernie Delegates Network (which I coordinate), an independent group sponsored by the online activist organization RootsAction.org in partnership with Progressive Democrats of America.
“The DNC must either change or it will die,” says PDA executive director Donna Smith. “And that change starts with Ms. Brazile’s prompt resignation.”
This morning, RootsAction launched a nationwide petition campaign calling for Brazile to resign immediately.
Southern Baptists Reject confederate Flag
I wouldn’t have thought this possible as little as 20 years ago…
U.S. Southttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_tIxFJhR5khern Baptists Formally Repudiate Confederate Flag
The resolution calls for Southern Baptist churches to discontinue displaying the Confederate flag as a “sign of solidarity of the whole Body of Christ.”
The U.S. Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution on Tuesday repudiating the Confederate battle flag as an emblem of slavery, marking the latest bid for racial reconciliation by America’s largest Protestant denomination.
The resolution, passed at the predominantly white convention’s annual meeting in St. Louis, calls for Southern Baptist churches to discontinue displaying the Confederate flag as a “sign of solidarity of the whole Body of Christ.”
The action came four years after the denomination elected its first black president, Fred Luter, a pastor and civic leader from New Orleans.
Rev. Fred Luter was named the denomination’s first black president four years ago.
In 1995, a Southern Baptist committee issued a resolution apologizing to African-Americans for condoning slavery and racism during the early years of the denomination’s 171-year history.
The convention, currently made up of more than 46,000 churches nationwide, was established in 1845 after Southern Baptists split from the First Baptist Church in America in the pre-Civil War era over the issue of slavery.
The denomination now counts a growing number of minorities among its more than 15.8 million members and has sought in recent years to better reflect the diversity of its congregants and America as a whole.
“This denomination was founded by people who wrongly defended the sin of human slavery,” said Russell Moore, head of the convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. “Today the nation’s largest Protestant denomination voted to repudiate the Confederate battle flag, and it’s time and well past time.”
The flag carried by the South’s pro-slavery Confederate forces during the 1861-65 U.S. Civil War re-emerged as a flashpoint in America’s troubled race relations after the massacre of nine blacks by a white gunman at an historic church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015. The assailant was seen afterward in photographs posing with the flag.
The episode stirred a movement to eliminate the Stars and Bars flag – seen by many whites as a sign of Southern heritage, not hate – from South Carolina’s statehouse and many other public displays in the South during the months that followed.
Exorcising Evil – National Cathedral to Remove Confederate Flags From Windows
During the early 50’s initial Civil Rights victories in the Courts, confederate sympathizers attempted to place the confederate flag as a symbol of resistance to Civil Rights on damn near every outhouse and truck stop in the United States. This included adding confederate symbology to the State Flags of a number of States in the South, and hundreds of statues to line city streets…
And it included efforts to stick the confederate Flag in places with no association whatsoever with the cause of slavery.
What they should do is replace the windows entirely, perhaps with a memorial to the Civil War dead.
National Cathedral to replace Confederate flags in windows
Washington National Cathedral says it will remove the images of a Confederate battle flag from its stained glass windows because, officials say, it is an image of hatred and racial supremacy.
The Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde is the Episcopal bishop of Washington and interim dean at the cathedral. She said in a prepared statement on Wednesday that a task force examined the origins of the windows and the impact of racist symbols. The windows were installed in 1953.
After receiving the task force’s report, cathedral officials decided the flags will be replaced by plain glass on two 8-foot-by-4-foot windows. The cathedral is working to determine the cost and establish a timeline.
The windows honor Confederate generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee.
New Orleans Vote to Remove confederate Statues Scheduled
Take ’em down!
New Orleans Considers Removing Confederate Monuments
New Orleans is poised to make a sweeping break with its Confederate past as city leaders decide whether to remove prominent monuments from some of its busiest streets.
With support from Mayor Mitch Landrieu, a majority on the City Council appears ready to take down four monuments, including a towering statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Their ordinance has sparked passionate responses for and against these symbols, and both sides will get one more say at a special council meeting before Thursday’s vote.
If approved, this would be one of the most sweeping gestures yet by an American city to sever ties with Confederate history.
“This has never happened before,” said Charles Kelly Barrow, commander-in-chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. “I’ve never heard of a city trying to sweep [away] all Confederate monuments.”
Geographers have identified at least 872 parks, natural features, schools, streets and other locations named for major Confederate leaders in 44 states, according to a mapping project. Barrow said more than a thousand statues and monuments and countless plaques also honor Confederate battles and heroes.
What’s happening in New Orleans reflects a new effort to rethink all this history: Confederate iconography is being questioned across the nation, and in some places falling from public view.
“It is a grand scale of symbolic rewriting of the landscape,” said Derek Alderman, a geographer at the University of Tennessee who is mapping Confederate symbolism nationwide. “It certainly represents a wholesale re-questioning of the legitimacy of remembering the Confederacy so publicly.”
Barrow said he and others will sue if necessary to keep the monuments where they are.
“I’m going to do everything in my power to take on these people,” Barrow said. “I’m not going to let this happen under my administration.”
Landrieu first proposed taking down these monuments after police said a white supremacist killed nine parishioners inside the African-American Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina in June. “Supremacy may be a part of our past, but it should not be part of our future,” he declared.
Anti-Confederate sentiment has grown since then around the country, along with protests against police mistreatment, as embodied by the Black Lives Matter movement.
South Carolina and Alabama removed Confederate battle flags from their Capitol grounds after the shooting. The University of Mississippi took down the state flag because it includes the Confederate emblem. The University of Texas demoted its statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis to a history museum.
In New Orleans, the mayor asked the council to take a closer look at monuments that have long been part of the city’s landscape.
The most imposing has had a commanding position over St. Charles Avenue since 1884: A 16-foot-tall bronze statue of Lee stands atop a 60-foot-high Doric marble column, which itself rises over granite slabs on an earthen mound. Four sets of stone staircases, aligned with the major compass points, ascend the mound.
Above it all, the Virginian stands in his military uniform, with his arms folded and his gaze set firmly on the North — the embodiment of the “Cult of the Lost Cause” southerners invoked to justify continued white power after the Civil War.
Also up for removal is a bronze figure of the Confederate president that now stands at Canal Street and Jefferson Davis Parkway, and a more local hero, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, who straddles a prancing horse at the entrance to City Park. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard was born in St. Bernard Parish, and commanded Confederate forces at the war’s first battle.
The most controversial is an 1891 obelisk honoring the Crescent City White League. An inscription added in 1932 said the Yankees withdrew federal troops and “recognized white supremacy in the South” after the group challenged Louisiana’s biracial government after the Civil War.In 1993, these words were covered by a granite slab with a new inscription, saying the obelisk honors “Americans on both sides” who died and that the conflict “should teach us lessons for the future.”
The city has estimated it will cost $144,000 to remove the monuments, and says an anonymous donor will pay that cost.
The shootings in Charleston have made these lessons take on new relevance, Alderman said.
“There are a lot of people making a direct connection between a white supremacy group and the effect on African-Americans,” said the geographer, who’s been tracking many examples of “a questioning of the authority that the Confederacy has been given on the landscape.”
Popular culture, Alderman said, is trying to establish how to rewrite “American and Southern public memory in a way that makes room for both perspectives on heritage, and at the same time is fair and just to African-American perspectives that historically have not been recognized.”
The Memphis city council is trying something similar, voting in August to remove an equestrian statue of Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who also traded slaves and led the Ku Klux Klan. Memphis even wants to remove the graves of Forrest and his wife, who lay buried under the statue.
Battle in Baltimore over confederate Monuments
Not sure why Baltimore should have confederate monuments – but there are 4 in the city.
Anonymous Donor Pays to Remove Confederate Statues
More dead Rebs memorabilia to be removed in New Orleans.
Now…About Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va?
The statue of Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard has been spray painted with ‘Black Lives Matter’ on both sides.
Anonymous donor to pay for removal of Confederate statues
An anonymous donor has agreed to foot the bill for the removal of four Confederate-related statues, the city announced in a letter this week to the New Orleans City Council.
It will cost an estimated $126,000 to take down the statues of Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard and Jefferson Davis, as well as a monument to the Battle of Liberty Place. The donor agreed to pay the entire cost.
“These four statues stand in direct contradiction to the ideal of freedom enshrined in our Constitution and their presence in our city was meant to perpetuate a false history that literally puts the Confederacy on a pedestal,” Deputy Mayor Andy Kopplin said in the Sept. 14 letter. “True remembrance is required, not blind reverence.”
Police Chief Michael Harrison backed the removal of the Confederate symbols, saying in his own letter to the council that the statues have been “flashpoints for criminal activity and civil unrest” and that he can’t afford to “dedicate manpower to protecting inanimate statues.”
He labeled as “particularly shameful” the Liberty Place monument that was “originally commissioned explicitly to celebrate an uprising that that resulted in the deaths of 13 police officers.
One of those killed was Superintendent Algernon Sidney Badger who led the newly integrated Metropolitan Police Department, the first police force dedicated to protecting black residents as well as whites.
“It is a disservice to Superintendent Badger’s memory and those of his fellow officers to allow a monument to the perpetrators of this attack to remain standing,” Harrison wrote.…More…
A Monument to murdering Cops. The “Battle of Liberty Place” was an attempted insurrection by the Crescent City White League against the legal Reconstruction state government on September 14, 1874 in New Orleans, where it was then based.
Btx3's Blog 