A crowd of activists toppled the marble Christopher Columbus statue near Little Italy Saturday night and dumped it into the Inner Harbor amid Fourth of July firework displays across the city.

Two weeks ago, an anti-racist protest group known as Baltimore Bloc publicly warned Baltimore Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young that activists planned to take down the city’s Columbus monuments if his administration did not act to remove them.

The most prominent of three city monuments to Columbus, the statue at the eastern edge of the Inner Harbor was unveiled by President Ronald Reagan and Mayor William Donald Schaefer in 1984 and dedicated with the inscription to the “Discoverer of America.” The 14-foot statue was paid for by a citywide fundraising campaign led by the Italian American Organizations United of Maryland.

Two years ago year this summer, 19 months after a city commission recommended two of the city’s four Confederate monuments be taken down and two more receive educational plaques, then-Mayor Catherine Pugh ordered the removal of all four.

Lester Davis, a spokesman for Young, told the Baltimore Sun that the destruction of Columbus statue is part of a “re-examination taking place nationally and globally around some of these monuments and statues that may represent different things to different people.”

City Council President Brandon Scott, who won last month’s Democratic mayoral primary, issued a statement Saturday night saying he supports both the Baltimore’s Italian-American community and Baltimore’s indigenous community. “I cannot, however, support Columbus,” Scott said.

In 2016, Scott introduced a bill that would’ve renamed Columbus Day in the city to Indigenous Peoples Day. Scott said the intention of the legislation, which did not pass, was “to honor the many peoples inhabiting North America before its colonization by European settlers.”

Scott said he suggested to former Mayor Catherine Pugh that she remove the Columbus statue along with the city’s Confederate statues following a violent conflict between white supremacists and anti-racism activists in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Baltimore City Councilman Ryan Dorsey has introduced a bill that would rededicate the Columbus obelisk at Herring Run to the victims of police brutality.

In a statement Sunday, Governor Larry Hogan condemned the destruction of the Columbus statue and said Baltimore leaders had lost “control of the city and their own streets.”

“While we support peaceful protests and constructive dialogue on whether and how to put certain monuments in context or move them to museums or storage through a legal process, lawlessness, vandalism, and destruction of public property are completely unacceptable,” Hogan said. “That is the antithesis of democracy and should be condemned by everyone, regardless of their politics. Baltimore City leaders need to regain control of their own streets and immediately start making them safer.”

Several state delegates representing Baltimore County and Harford County and a group of Italian-American activists demanded Young and Hogan protect the city’s statues and monuments erected to honor Christopher Columbus at a June 29 press conference at the Inner Harbor.

In a tweet Saturday night, Del. Kathy Szeliga called the pulling down of the Columbus memorial on July 4 “shameful,” and asked where the police and Mayor Young were while the statue was being toppled. She suggested citizens, “move out of Baltimore City while you can if you still live there.”

“This is deeply personal and an affront to the Italian American community and all law-abiding Marylanders,” tweeted State Del. Nino Mangione, a Republican from Baltimore County. “The city of Baltimore has been disgraced once again. America weeps at this outrage.”

Baltimore’s annual October Columbus Day Commemoration and Italian Heritage Festival and parade, approaching 130 years, is believed to be the longest-running celebration in honor of Columbus in the country.

In his speech on July 4, President Donald Trump pledged to “defend, protect, and preserve American way of life, which began in 1492 when Columbus discovered America.”

The Italian-born explorer’s legacy has received increased scrutiny in recent decades as his brutal treatment of the native people of the Caribbean islands and Central America—including mass slaughter, forced mining, enslavement, and child rape—has become better known and understood.

Popular myths regarding Columbus, long taught in schools, have also been exposed by scholars, changing public perception of the nature of his voyages. Columbus did not prove the “flat Earth” theory wrong. Nor was Columbus the first European to sail to the continent, as Scandinavians sailors had done so centuries earlier. Those beliefs and others took hold in the United States after acclaimed writer Washington Irving popularized an “Americanized” Columbus in a best-selling fictionalized historical biography in 1828.

With the pulling down of the statue, Baltimore joins a growing list of cities this summer, including Richmond, Montgomery, Boston, and St. Paul, that have witnessed the toppling of Confederate and Columbus memorials. Numerous cities across the country have made plans to remove statues.

Herds of people flocked to Wyman Park this afternoon to snap a photo of the stone block that once housed the Lee-Jackson Confederate monument. Now all that remains is the memory of what was, and an adjacent 400-pound sculpture by artist Pablo Machioli, of a pregnant Black woman with her fist raised in an expression of protest.

Shortly before midnight, crews hired by the city removed the statues of Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson on Wyman Park Drive, Confederate Soldiers and Sailors in Bolton Hill, Confederate Women near the Johns Hopkins University Homewood campus, and Roger B. Taney in Mt. Vernon from the stone slabs they’ve rested on for decades.

The removal comes on the heels of Monday’s city council unanimous vote to immediately destroy the statues, as proposed by Councilman Brandon M. Scott. In a statement on Tuesday, Governor Larry Hogan also ordered the immediate removal of the Taney statue in front of the state house in Annapolis stating, “It’s the right thing to do.”

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In an effort to prevent future protest and vandalizing of the monuments, Pugh invoked her rights as mayor to “protect her city” and proceeded with the removal despite not receiving the approval of the Maryland Historical Trust Easement Committee.

“I thought there’s enough speeches being made,” she said in Wednesday’s press conference. “I’m not a person that takes a long time to get things done. Get it done.”

This afternoon, crowds at Wyman Park had a mix of relief, closure, anger, and appreciation in reaction to the absent statue. A young mother with her two children stood at the base of the pedestal with reflective stares as she explained the significance of the statue and its removal. 

Clarinda Harriss, a 78-year-old Baltimore native and ancestor of Confederate soldiers, wrote a letter to Mayor Pugh and the city of Baltimore showing her appreciation for the removal, recalling a significant childhood memory at the Lee-Jackson monument.

“Sixty-nine years ago, when I was nine years old, I was dressed up in a yellow, polka dot dress and led up to the pedestal of the Lee-Jackson memorial to place a bunch of yellow roses there during the monument’s dedication,” Harriss says in the letter. “Today, I place roses on the pedestal in in praise of the city of Baltimore for its wise and discreet action last night in removing the statue. It was necessary . . . I am proud of Baltimore today.”

Pugh said that she did not know where the statues were moved to or where they would end up, but suggested that plaques should be installed to describe “what was there and why it was removed.”

*Update following the August 14 Baltimore City Council meeting: Councilman Brandon M. Scott introduced a measure to have all Confederate-era monuments throughout the city destroyed. The council unanimously voted to adopt Scott’s resolution calling for the immediate destruction of the monuments.

“We should not have these here for public display,” Scott said during the meeting. “We should not move them somewhere else for public display because it is still disrespectful.”

Despite the decision made by the city council members, Mayor Catherine Pugh is still taking the necessary steps to remove and relocate the statues to Confederate cemeteries in Hagerstown and Scotland, Maryland. 

This past weekend, violent clashes at a white nationalist rally to protest the removal of Confederate monuments in Charlottesville, Virginia ended with three deaths and 19 people injured. Baltimore is no stranger to this issue and the events further ignited local residents in the effort to cut ties with the city’s Confederate roots.

In an effort organized by Baltimore Bloc, more than 1,000 people marched in a peaceful protest from Wyman Park to Charles Village and back on Sunday to denounce the violence and bigotry represented in Charlottesville, as well as protest various Confederate monuments throughout the city.

Mayor Catherine Pugh said that she has reached out to contractors to have the monuments of Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson on Wyman Park Drive, Confederate Soldiers and Sailors in Bolton Hill, Confederate Women near the Johns Hopkins University Homewood campus, and Roger B. Taney in Mt. Vernon removed.

“It is my intention to move forward with the removal of Baltimore City’s Confederate statues,” Mayor Pugh said in a statement. “I have read the recommendations of the task force set up by the previous administration which were reported in January 2016.”

The recommendations made by seven commissioners, appointed by former Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, was a 34-page report detailing the history of each statue, concluding that two of the monuments—the Lee-Jackson statue and Taney bust—should be removed instead of destroyed.  The commission also voted to keep, but add context to, the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors and Confederate Women’s monuments.

Councilman Brandon M. Scott has also called for the Confederate-era memorials to be destroyed. He plans to introduce new legislation at today’s city council meeting for the immediate destruction of the monuments.

“There’s no need to even discuss whether we should have a Confederate monument in the city of Baltimore,” Scott said. “Why are we honoring traitors? They should have never been erected. We should destroy them now.”

Before Rawlings-Blake left office last year, signage was placed at the Confederate monument sites stating, in part, that the memorials were “part of a propaganda campaign of national pro-Confederate organizations to perpetuate the beliefs of white supremacy, falsify history, and support segregation and racial intimidation.”

Opponents of the monuments’ removal include the Maryland chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV). Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. John Zebelean and SCV member last year referred to the local and national effort to remove Confederate statues as “a veritable tsunami of anti-Confederate vitriol . . . In Baltimore, the mayor plans for a commission to advise her on what to do with the Confederate monuments, most of which have been there for more than a century.”

For its part, the national chapter of the SCV denounced the actions of the white supremacist groups in Charlottesville this past weekend. “I condemn in the strongest possible way the actions, words, and beliefs of the KKK and white supremacist groups,” said SCV’s chaplain-in-chief. “These groups are filled with hatred and bigotry. They do not represent in any way true Southern heritage.”

As for Baltimore, Mayor Pugh has suggested taking steps beyond what the original monument commission recommended, although her plans come with a substantial price tag. After meeting with Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans, who removed four Confederate monuments in May, Pugh learned that the cost for re locating four statues totaled $2.1 million, which included the actual removal, police overtime, and storage cost.

“I have taken steps to appoint a working group to lead the process for removing the confederate monuments,” she said. “I am adding two members from the private sector to help us with the fundraising. Anyone wishing to contribute can forward their contribution to the Baltimore City Foundation/Confederate Monument Removal.”

Pugh has also formally requested approval from the Maryland Historical Trust Easement Committee to remove the Lee-Jackson monument, as well as identify Confederate cemeteries in Maryland that would be willing to accept the monuments upon removal. She plans to provide a public update after receiving reports from the task force and contractors. At that time, she will also announce a timeline for the removal of the monuments.

“A decision will be made at an appropriate time,” her spokesman, Anthony McCarthy, said in a statement. “She wants to do what serves the best interests of the citizens of Baltimore.”

*Update following the final Jan. 14 public meeting of the special commission named by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake to review the city’s four Confederate monuments: The seven commissioners voted by a 4-3 margin today to recommend removing the city’s Robert E. Lee-Stonewall Jackson monument from Wyman Dell and the Roger B. Taney bust in Mt. Vernon.

The commission also voted to keep, but add context to the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors monument in Bolton Hill and the Confederate Women’s monument near The Johns Hopkins University campus in Homewood. The commissioners will meet again privately before issuing their final report to the mayor, which is expected to be completed in 6-8 weeks.

The commission intends to offer the Robert E. Lee-Stonewall Jackson monument to the U.S. Park Service for placement on the Civil War battlefield of Chancellorsville, VA—where the two met in a scene depicted by the sculpture. The bust of Taney, the former Supreme Court chief justice who issued the infamous Dred Scott decision, is a replica of a similar bust in Annapolis. No consensus was reached by the commission regarding what should be done with the Taney bust, if it is ultimately removed.

The story below was published in Baltimore magazine this month and traces the history of Baltimore’s Confederate monuments and the more recent controversy surrounding their ongoing existence and meaning in the city. The story was posted online in mid-December as the commission was holding earlier public meetings:

A Chesapeake Bay breeze blusters across Point Lookout State Park as Confederate flags are raised, the whistling wind and scattering leaves adding solemnity to the funereal mid-October morning. When the Civil War began, the southern tip of St. Mary’s County had been a popular resort, filled with cottages, a hotel, a wharf, and a lighthouse. But after Gettysburg, the Union army turned the peninsula into a massive prisoner-of-war camp. By the end of the bloody conflict, some 50,000 Confederate troops had been interned, making it the North’s largest such institution. Of course, whether Maryland, a tobacco-growing, slavery-legal state that didn’t get around to voting on secession, was—or is—“in the North” remains debatable. Not in dispute is that conditions at Point Lookout deteriorated as its Confederate population exploded—an 80-foot granite obelisk here carries the names of the 3,382 known Confederate soldiers who died while incarcerated on the 40-acre grounds.

All of this, and other reasons, too, is why two-dozen Maryland Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) are taking part in this remembrance ceremony. A SCV stalwart, retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. John Zebelean, leads the color guard. The group’s chaplain prays an invocation and a representative from the North Carolina Order of the Confederate Rose, a women’s group, lays a wreath, followed by a musket and cannon salute and the singing of “Dixie.” Not quite a full-on Civil War re-enactment, but similar.

Zebelean, still trim, in a gray calvary officer’s uniform, waist sword included, notes in his address that much has changed from the Civil War’s centennial and the sesquicentennial this past year. A Catonsville native, he is referring, directly, to local and national efforts to remove Confederate monuments from public squares in response to the murders of black churchgoers in Charleston, SC.

“A veritable tsunami of anti-Confederate vitriol,” Zebelean calls the reaction, highlighting the removal of Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s statue from a Memphis park. (Zebelean doesn’t mention that Forrest was a slave-trader, accused of an infamous massacre of black Union soldiers, and the original Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.)

“In Baltimore, the mayor plans for a commission to advise her on what to do with the Confederate monuments in the city, most of which have been there for more than a century,” he continues. “Like sharks smelling blood, the feeding frenzy is on.”

Zebelean’s remarks are greeted with enthusiasm and cheers. They’re not intended to, nor do they, incite hostility or threats. As the folding chairs are picked up, the Sons of Confederate Veterans mingle in the cemetery’s parking lot with spouses and friends. There’s a tangible camaraderie, not unlike after a football game or, say, a traditional Veterans Day event.

“See, we’re not wearing white hoods,” says Maryland Division SCV commander Jay Barringer, smiling before driving home to Sykesville. “These people are engineers, bankers, and I.T. professionals,” adds Barringer, a North Carolina transplant with an infectious Southern drawl, who helps close the ceremony with a rendition of “Amazing Grace” on Scottish bagpipes.

Lost on Barringer, apparently, is the irony that the Christian hymn, published in 1779, was written by a former slave-ship captain named John Newton, whose epiphany during a violent North Atlantic storm led him into the clergy and England’s abolitionist movement.

On June 17, Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old with Confederate sympathies, allegedly shot and killed nine Bible study members at Charleston’s nearly 200-year-old Emanual African Methodist Episcopal Church. (He has pled not guilty for his upcoming trial.) Ten days later, activist and filmmaker Bree Newsome—coincidentally, a Maryland native—climbed a 30-foot pole outside the South Carolina State House and pulled down the Confederate flag there, an act for which she was arrested. Her protest, however, subsequently inspired further efforts here and throughout the U.S., as Zebelean related, to officially rid public areas of Confederate monuments and imagery.

In the days following the Charleston massacre, former Baltimore NAACP chapter president Marvin “Doc” Cheatham Sr. and other activists began calling for the removal of the prominent Robert E. Lee-Stonewall Jackson monument across from The Baltimore Museum of Art and also the renaming of Robert E. Lee Park in Baltimore County. Then, on the same afternoon as a Cheatham-led press conference—three days after Newsome’s direct action—Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake announced the creation of a commission to review four of the city’s Confederate statues. It set in motion a six-month process that will lead to recommendations in the coming months as to what Baltimore should do, if anything, with its controversial statues—the Lee-Jackson monument; the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors monument in Bolton Hill; the Confederate Women’s statue in Homewood; and the Roger B. Taney statue on Mt. Vernon Place.

But while the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments gained urgency in light of the Charleston massacre, the Black Lives Matter movement, and other issues, it is not new. The memorialization of the Confederacy has been a source of contention ever since Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

“Of course, the monuments are becoming flashpoints,” says Montgomery County resident and Harvard-trained sociologist James W. Loewen, the best-selling author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong. “They were intended all along to be divisive.” They’re not put in place to heal, Loewen says, “but to promote segregationist values.”

In fact, in an 1880 letter, an actual Confederate veteran named Charles Crane warned then-Baltimore Mayor Ferdinand Latrobe against building the Confederate monument proposed at the time.

“ . . . with a heart full of love and reverence for my fallen comrades, I am unwilling to see erected in the public streets of this city a monument to a dead idea, but which will be a standing menace, and a source of bitterness not only to a great number of the citizens of Baltimore and Maryland, but a great number of the people of the United States.”

Crane, obviously, proved more prophetic than he could imagine.

Already since Charleston—and 135 years after Crane’s plea was ultimately ignored—changes are underway across the state. In Rockville, a courthouse Confederate statue has been boarded up in preparation for a move to a nearby historical park. In Frederick, aldermen passed a resolution to remove from the steps of City Hall a bust of Taney—the Supreme Court chief justice who delivered the notorious Dred Scott decision that ruled slaves remain the property of their owners in free states and that all blacks were not, and never could be, full U.S. citizens, including those who were “free.” From Annapolis, Gov. Larry Hogan requested the Motor Vehicle Administration stop issuing and recall commemorative Confederate license plates, and in Baltimore County, the name of Robert E. Lee Park (owned by the city, but operated by the county) was changed to Lake Roland on the county’s website.

These may seem like knee-jerk reactions, but efforts to remove the Taney bust in Frederick, to block the issuance of Sons of Confederate Veterans license plates, and to change the state song from “Maryland, My Maryland”—a Confederate battle hymn calling on residents to spurn “the Northern scum!”—have been going on for two decades.

As evidence of the challenges of renaming or remaking decades-old and century-old landmarks, the Lake Roland change has managed to draw criticism from even those who wanted the Robert E. Lee name stricken. That’s because of the new name’s association with the Roland Park Company—the neighborhood’s founding developer, which used racially restrictive housing covenants to promote white-only segregation.

“The problem we have had is that both African-Americans and Caucasians, and I’m talking about our elected officials, know so little about history,” says Cheatham. “We have leadership that doesn’t understand the city’s history and just allowed the Freedom House [a former civil-rights hub where national figures like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt met with local black leaders] on Druid Hill Avenue to be demolished.”

As Cheatham points out, it is exactly the history, artistic and political values, and intention behind Baltimore’s Confederate public monuments—erected between 1887 and 1948—that the special commission is tasked with discerning. More difficult will be sorting out the role the monuments should play going forward: The commission could recommend leaving the monuments alone; adding historical signage, putting the statues in some type of context; relocating one or more to the Civil War Museum on President Street, for example; or removing them from view altogether. Some of these options, naturally, are more expensive than others.

Three weeks after the Sons of Confederate Veterans memorial service in Southern Maryland, Loewen and Eli Pousson, director of preservation at Baltimore Heritage, presented research around the monuments to the commission at a crowded City Hall meeting. They explained that such statues, essentially, were erected to help build the now century-and-a-half-in-the-making mythology of the “Lost Cause.” More than inanimate objects, Confederate monuments embody a broader, post-Civil War effort to rework history. They are concrete representations of a campaign begun almost immediately after the war in Maryland, other border states, and across the South to recast what was a rebellion to preserve slavery into a noble “Lost Cause” fought for “states’ rights” by honorable and courageous men. Or, as the inscription on the Lee-Jackson monument describes the horseback-riding generals: “Christian soldiers . . . [who] waged war like gentlemen.”

There’s no doubt that such efforts have been successful. In a 2011 Pew Research Center poll, 48 percent of respondents said the Civil War was mainly about states’ rights; only 38 percent said it was mostly about slavery, while 9 percent said it was about both. Those figures startle historians such as UCLA professor Joan Waugh, co-editor of The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture, who says, “It’s insane not to acknowledge the primary role of slavery.” She points not just to secession documents, but also speeches from the period, “which are all about protecting the institution of slavery.”

And if there’s any doubt that this desire to paint the Civil War in a new light continues, consider Texas, where 5 million freshly written textbooks that further play down the role of slavery were introduced to schools this fall.

“They were intended to be divisive . . . to promote segregationist values.”

“The secession documents are online,” says Loewen. “South Carolina’s statement—and they were the first to secede—spells out in the first sentence that it’s about slavery. The others do the same. These were written by Southern leaders who wanted strong federal enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act after Northern states began passing laws that nullified its effect. They were pissed off at what New England states were doing.”

In Baltimore, Pousson says, Confederate memorials present more than a reminder of the city’s mixed North-South allegiances. “The meaning of the works is not confined to the Civil War,” Pousson highlights in his report to the commission, “but reflects the racist reaction against civil rights in Maryland and the South from the 1860s to the 1960s.”

For decades now, the Sons of Confederate Veterans have celebrated Robert E. Lee’s and Stonewall Jackson’s birthdays—which fall four and six days, respectively, after King’s and thus on King’s holiday weekend—at the Lee-Jackson monument. And for the fourth year, Quakers from Stony Run Friends will protest the SCV ceremony with a silent vigil.

Ann Kehinde, who attends the Stony Run meetings, lives across the street from the Lee-Jackson monument with her two biracial children and her husband, who is black. It was her son, Suraju, now a college freshman, channeling his frustration over the veneration of the Confederate generals on King’s birthday, who initiated the talks about an appropriate Quaker counter demonstration.

“As my children studied the Civil War in school, they were at first puzzled as to why this commemoration took place, and then they were angry that it was held on the Saturday before Dr. King’s birthday was celebrated,” Kehinde says. “I think we have come to a point in our city’s history where we must recognize the pain caused by those who continue to glorify the Confederacy. For me, this statue is a daily reminder.”

More recently, about two months ago, the Lee-Jackson monument ignited another kind of confrontation.

After the October 29 meeting of the Confederate monument commission, artist Pablo Machioli, with assistance from activist friends, placed a 13-foot, 400-pound sculpture of a pregnant black woman—her fist raised—directly in front of the Lee-Jackson double-equestrian statue. His piece was inspired by black resistance to oppression and full of symbolism, not the least of which, Machioli explains, is that “we all come from a woman, from an African woman.” A Uruguayan who says he has experienced police brutality in Baltimore, Machioli didn’t want to create a work that faced off with the Lee-Jackson monument, but one that expressed in a similarly triumphal manner, themes of peace, brotherhood, and social justice.

His work stood for 22 hours until it was ordered removed by the City Recreation and Parks Department and the police arrived. At that point, Machioli brought the statue back to the Copycat building in Station North where he has a studio. Soon afterward, the statue was vandalized—the woman’s pregnant stomach kicked in and the “N-word” spray-painted across her body—while it was being kept in one of the building’s public walkways.

It didn’t end there, however.

After the statue was carried inside Machioli’s studio to protect it from further damage, poet Nakia Brown, who also lives in the Copycat building, wrote a series of seven poems in response to Machioli’s sculpture—“that looked like me,” she says—and its destruction.

Her poems were pulled from the wall near where the statue had been placed, urinated upon, and left on the floor.

“People told me that they couldn’t believe that it happened in the Copycat, which is artist housing,” says Brown. “But for me, as a black woman who grew up in Baltimore, I don’t live in that same bubble. I was surprised that someone who lives in this community would deface a piece of art. It is not shocking someone wrote that word, or racism exists here.”

The final hearing of the special commission to review Baltimore’s public Confederate monuments is scheduled for January 14. The commission’s report and recommendations are expected to be delivered to the mayor early this year.

“I want them destroyed,” Brown says of the Confederate monuments, pausing to consider her words. “I want them removed. They didn’t deserve to be there in the first place.”