Protesters topple Jefferson Davis statue in Virginia capital

A crowd cheered and police looked on as the monument — installed in 1907 during the Jim Crow era — was towed away.

Jun 11, 2020

The statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis is splattered with paint after it was toppled Wednesday night, June 10, 2020, along Monument Drive in Richmond, Va. (Dylan Garner/Richmond Times-Dispatch via AP)

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Protesters pulled down a century-old statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in the former capital of the Confederacy, adding it to the list of Old South monuments removed or damaged around the U.S. in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

The bronze figure on Richmond’s grand Monument Avenue had been all but marked for removal by city leaders in a matter of weeks, but demonstrators took matters into their own hands Wednesday night, tying ropes around its legs and toppling it onto the pavement.

A crowd cheered and police looked on as the monument — installed by a Confederate heritage group in 1907 during the Jim Crow era — was towed away.

There were no immediate reports of any arrests.

The toppling came on the same day NASCAR banned Confederate flags — a common site for decades in a sport steeped in Southern tradition — at its stock car races. Also this week, the streaming service HBO Max temporarily removed the 1939 movie “Gone With the Wind” — criticized for romanticizing slavery and the Civil War-era South — to add historical context.

In the weeks since Floyd’s death under a white Minneapolis police officer’s knee set off protests and sporadic violence across the U.S. over the treatment of black people, many Confederate symbols and monuments have been damaged or brought down, some toppled by demonstrators, others removed by local authorities.

Authorities in Alabama got rid of a massive obelisk in Birmingham and a bronze likeness of a Confederate naval officer in Mobile. In Virginia, a 176-year-old slave auction block was removed in Fredericksburg, and the United Daughters of the Confederacy took down a statue in Alexandria.

The movement has extended around the world, with protesters decrying monuments to slave traders, imperialists and explorers, including Christopher Columbus, Cecil Rhodes and Belgium’s King Leopold II.

The Davis monument was a few blocks away from a 12-ton, 61-foot-high equestrian statue of the most revered Confederate of them all, Gen. Robert E. Lee, that the state of Virginia is trying to take down. Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam last week ordered its removal, but a judge on Monday blocked such action for at least 10 days.

The spokesman for the Virginia division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, B. Frank Earnest, condemned the toppling of “public works of art” and likened losing the Confederate statues to losing a family member.

“The men who served under Robert E. Lee were my great-grandfathers or their brothers and their cousins. So it is my family,” he said. “What if a crowd of any other group went and found the symbols of someone they didn’t like and decided to tear them down? Everybody would be appalled.”

He added: “But I don’t know why it’s acceptable, why people who are descended from the Confederate Army and the Confederate soldiers, it’s accepted in this country that you can do anything to us you want.”

The toppling of the Davis statue reflected protesters’ impatience with political leaders. A commission of historians and government leaders in 2018 had recommended taking down the monument, and Mayor Levar Stoney recently announced that he would introduce an ordinance in July to remove it and statues of other Confederates, including Gens. Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart.

The move was supposed to coincide with the effective date of a new state law that undoes protections for Confederate monuments and lets local governments decide what to do with them.

Stoney tweeted Thursday that he will push to quickly remove the other monuments and asked protesters not to do it themselves.

“For the sake of public safety, I ask the community to allow us to legally contract to have the remaining ones removed professionally, to prevent any potential harm that could result from attempts to remove them without professional experience,” Stoney said.

While it wasn’t clear what would happen to the toppled Davis statue, Stoney indicated it “is gone” for good.

“He never deserved to be up on that pedestal,” the mayor said, calling Davis a “racist & traitor.”

Also Wednesday night, protesters in Portsmouth, Virginia, about 80 miles (130 kilometers) away, knocked the heads off the statues of four Confederates and pulled one of the statues to the ground after the City Council put off a decision on moving the monument.

A protester was hit in the head and knocked unconscious as the monument fell. He was hospitalized with what police said were life-threatening injuries.

James Boyd, the Portsmouth NAACP chapter president, said that “people are just tired of being sick and tired” and that the monument represents more than 400 years of oppression.

On Tuesday, protesters in Richmond tore down a statue of Columbus, set it on fire and pitched it into a lake.

Supporters of Confederate monuments have argued that they are important reminders of history, while opponents contend they glorify those who led a rebellion to preserve slavery.

The Davis monument and many others across the South were erected decades after the Civil War during the Jim Crow era, when states imposed tough new segregation laws, and during the Lost Cause movement, in which historians and others sought to recast the South’s rebellion as a noble undertaking, fought to defend not slavery but states’ rights.

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Associated Press writers Jonathan Drew in Durham, North Carolina, and Ben Finley in Norfolk, Virginia, contributed to this report.

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