Charlottesville to cloak 2 statues

City Council hears residents’ anger over leeway given rally

An advocacy group wants to change the name of Faneuil Hall in Boston, saying the 1742 building was named for a wealthy merchant who owned and traded slaves.
An advocacy group wants to change the name of Faneuil Hall in Boston, saying the 1742 building was named for a wealthy merchant who owned and traded slaves.

The Charlottesville City Council voted to drape two Confederate statues in black fabric during a meeting packed with residents who screamed and cursed at council members over the city's response to a white nationalist rally.

The anger at Monday night's meeting, during which three people were arrested, forced the council to abandon its agenda and focus instead on the tragedy. Covering the statues is intended to signal the city's mourning for Charlottesville resident Heather Heyer, who was killed when a car slammed into a crowd of counterprotesters.

"I think what you saw last night was a traumatized community beginning the process of catharsis," Mayor Mike Signer said Tuesday.

The council meeting was the first since the "Unite the Right" event, which was believed to be the largest gathering of white nationalists in a decade. The demonstrators arrived in Charlottesville partly to protest the City Council's vote to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

That removal is in the midst of a legal challenge. A state law passed in 1998 forbids local governments from removing, damaging or defacing war monuments, but there is legal ambiguity about whether that applies to statues such as the Lee monument, which was erected before the law was passed. A judge has issued an injunction preventing the city from removing the Lee statue while the lawsuit plays out.

Signer said Tuesday that city employees had begun working to find a way to cover the large statues with a material that can withstand the elements. The council believes doing so would not violate the state law, he said.

At the meeting, many speakers directed their anger at Signer. They expressed frustration that city leaders had granted a permit for the Aug. 12 rally and criticized police for allowing the two sides to clash violently before the rally even started. That fighting went on largely uninterrupted by authorities, until the event was declared an unlawful assembly and the crowd was forced to disperse.

"Why did you think that you could walk in here and do business as usual after what happened on the 12th?" City Council candidate and community activist Nikuyah Walker said.

The mayor tried to restore order, but as tensions escalated, the meeting was temporarily suspended. Video showed protesters chanting "blood on your hands" as Signer stood at the front of the room. Others held signs calling for his resignation.

When the meeting resumed, the agenda was scuttled and the council listened to input from residents.

Three people were arrested on charges of disorderly conduct or obstruction of government operations, police said.

The council also voted to take the procedural first steps toward removing a statue of Confederate Gen. Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. City leaders had initially planned to leave it in place.

Later Tuesday, University of Virginia police disclosed that they had obtained arrest warrants for a white nationalist in connection with crimes they said were committed on campus a day before the rally that turned violent.

Police said in a statement that Christopher Cantwell of Keene, N.H., was being sought on three felony charges: two counts of the illegal use of tear gas or other gases and one count of malicious bodily injury with a "caustic substance," explosive or fire.

Cantwell said later that he had been trying for days to find out whether he had outstanding warrants.

He said he would turn himself in to authorities.

The police statement said the warrants stem from incidents on campus the evening of Aug. 11, when hundreds of white nationalists marched across the grounds, chanting anti-Semitic slogans and carrying torches. At one point, the marchers were confronted by a much smaller group of counterprotesters. Police didn't elaborate on the allegations against Cantwell.

FANEUIL HALL

Elsewhere, an advocacy group called for the renaming of Boston's historic Faneuil Hall because its namesake has ties to slavery.

The meetinghouse, built in 1742, is where Samuel Adams and other American colonists made some of the earliest speeches urging independence from Britain.

Kevin Peterson, founder of the New Democracy Coalition, said the name is an embarrassment to the city because Peter Faneuil was a wealthy merchant who owned and traded slaves. Faneuil built the meetinghouse for Boston.

Peterson suggested renaming Faneuil Hall to honor Crispus Attucks, a black man considered the first American killed in the Revolutionary War.

Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson cautioned that removing any part of the nation's complicated history "unbalances it" and "renders it false."

Vice President Mike Pence echoed that concern, telling Fox & Friends that "what we have to walk away from is a desire by some to erase parts of our history just in the name of some contemporary political cause."

Pence also said that state and local authorities should make decisions about Confederate statues and that he calls himself "someone who believes in more monuments, not less monuments."

Information for this article was contributed by Philip Marcelo and other staff members of The Associated Press.

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Photos by The Associated Press

A Section on 08/23/2017

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