Baltimore Mayor Says City Will 'Look To' Remove Confederate Monuments

"We will take a closer look at how we go about following in the footsteps of New Orleans."
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Days after New Orleans officials removed a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, the last of four Confederate monuments the city promised to take down, Baltimore’s mayor said she would look to follow “in the footsteps” of the Big Easy.

“The city does want to remove these,” Mayor Catherine Pugh said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun. “We will take a closer look at how we go about following in the footsteps of New Orleans.”

Pugh’s predecessor, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, originally commissioned a review of the city’s Confederate monuments and an inquiry into how to remove them. She did not order for the removal of any of the statues, instead punting the decision to Pugh.

Before leaving office, Rawlings-Blake placed signs in front of four Confederate monuments that called the statues “part of a propaganda campaign of national pro-Confederate organizations,” The Baltimore Sun reported.

Pugh’s decision to revive the city’s inquiry into removing the statues will likely be met with protest. New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu (D) received death threats over his ruling to remove four statues. But in a speech some have heralded as historic, Landrieu doubled down on his commitment to removing statues that symbolize white supremacy.

“These statues are not just stone and metal,” Landrieu said. “They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy, ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement and the terror that it actually stood for.”

Watch the full speech here.

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