The mayor of Madison, Wisconsin ordered the removal of the statues depicting Confederate soldiers from the grounds of Forest Hill Cemetery, The Wisconsin State Journal reports.
Mayor Paul Soglin issued a statement on Thursday revealing that he's ordered his staff to remove a plaque and stone from the Confederate Rest area of the grounds, saying, "there should be no place in our country for bigotry, hatred or violence against those who seek to unite our communities and our country."
The plaque, installed in 1981, described the over 100 soldiers buried in the state as "valiant Confederate soldiers" and "unsung heroes." These soldiers had surrendered in battle and later died as prisoners of war in Camp Randall.
"Taking down monuments will not erase our shared history. The Confederacy's legacy will be with us, whether we memorialize it in marble or not," Soglin said. "We are acknowledging there is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it."
The mayor said that removing the monuments would cause no "disrespect to the dead," but that the Civil War was "an act of insurrection and treason and a defense of the deplorable practice of slavery," and that there is no need for monuments on city property.
"Charlottesville and the sustained attention to it, both to the deaths there and the way the president has responded to it, has clarified for a lot of people that we have some sort of civic housekeeping to do," Stephen Kantrowitz, history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told the paper. "Monuments that were celebrated or tolerated have moved into the realm of unworthy and even intolerable."
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