Protests force second look at monuments, memorials

Workers on Thursday morning temporarily removed a memorial to 39 police officers who died in the line of duty in Richmond, Va., after someone covered the bronze statue in red paint. The memorial in Byrd Park “will be repaired and restored before it is returned to public display,” James Nolan, a spokesman for Mayor Levar Stoney, told WRIC-TV. Someone took an ax to a similar memorial in Dover, Del., leaving behind the ax and a urine-soaked Delaware flag.

What other memorials are under fire? A historical commission voted to remove a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis from the Kentucky Capitol. Maryland House Speaker Adrienne Jones published a letter urging the removal of a plaque honoring both Union and Confederate Civil War soldiers at the state Capitol. Trustees at Clemson University on Friday voted to strip the name of South Carolina native and former U.S. Vice President John C. Calhoun, who defended slavery, from its honors college and asked the state legislature to approve a change to another campus building named after a known white supremacist. And a college student started an online petition to get the nation’s smallest state to shorten its official name of “State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.” Tyson Pianka wants to remove “plantations” from the name even though it is not a reference to the estates of slaveholders.

Dig deeper: From the WORLD archives, read Jamie Dean’s report on the 2017 debate over Confederate statues in Georgia.