August 16, 2017•Update: August 17, 2017
By Michael Hernandez
WASHINGTON
The city of Baltimore, Maryland, became the latest to remove confederate symbols from public spaces, silently removing all four of its confederate monuments early Wednesday.
That city’s council approved plans earlier this week to immediately remove the monuments that are viewed by many as symbols of hate and oppression.
Mayor Catherine Pugh told local media the statues would be sent to confederate cemeteries.
The city's decision follows a mass hate rally in Virginia last weekend that left one counter-protester dead and nearly 20 others injured when a car barreled down a narrow street into anti-racist demonstrators.
Mourners are gathering Wednesday in Charlottesville to remember Heather Heyer, the woman killed in the fatal car attack.
The gathering of neo-Nazis, white nationalists and white supremacists in Charlottesville is thought to be the largest such demonstration in about a decade.
Amid an outpouring of mass outrage, former President Barack Obama laid claim to the most liked tweet in the social media platform's history following a post Saturday of a photograph with children of various races looking out of a window at Obama.
"No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion," Obama said, quoting South African icon Nelson Mandela.
Twitter confirmed the post is the most liked tweet early Wednesday.
Protesters went to Charlottesville from across the country to protest the planned removal of a confederate statue, but since the deadly violence there a number of cities have been forced to reconsider the display of such imagery in their public spaces and about one dozen southern civil war symbols have either come toppling down, or are planned to be soon removed.
Alabama’s largest city of Birmingham has moved to cover a confederate monument in wooden panels after the state legislature passed a law earlier this year to block the removal of confederate structures.
In Lexington, Kentucky, the mayor has planned to remove two confederate monuments from the city's former courthouse.
Further north, the New York Episcopal diocese said it would remove two plaques honoring the leader of the confederacy's military, Robert E. Lee, from a church in Brooklyn.
And in Durham, North Carolina, a female college student has been arrested on suspicion of toppling a monument to confederate rebels outside government offices.
