Baltimore’s mayor said the city is considering removing four Confederate monuments because it no longer wants to honor the Confederacy or the ideas behind it.
Catherine Pugh said in a news conference Friday that the city "does want to remove these. We’ll take a closer look at it and see how we go about the business of following in the footsteps of New Orleans," CNN Politics reported.
Previous mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake had interpretive signage added to the monuments to make their significance clear, CNN reported. Another option being considered is donating the statues or auctioning them off, rather than paying $200,000 in estimated costs to move them.
The move comes weeks after New Orleans removed its fourth and final Confederate monument.
"To literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal in our more prominent places—in honor—is an inaccurate recitation of our full past, is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future," New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu said, CNN reported.
Pugh’s next step is to look at recommendations made to Rawlings-Blake when she was in office, her spokesman Anthony McCarthy told CNN. "Then she will make a determination and go from there," he said.
One of the monuments up for removal is of Roger Taney, who wrote the Dred Scott decision for the Supreme Court that said African-Americans could not be citizens, NPR reported. There are also monuments to Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
Former president of the Maryland chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy Carolyn Billups told the Baltimore Sun, "I find it interesting that Baltimore city has that kind of money to remove statues when there are problems with crime and schools. I would think that would be more of a priority."
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