BALTIMORE—It happened in the dead of night. Around midnight, as Tuesday turned into Wednesday, a crew of police officers and workers wielding a large crane began making rounds of the city’s parks and public squares, hauling away monuments to Confederate heroes.
When they were through, before sunrise, four statues that had stood for decades were gone, one chapter in a searing drama that is roiling cities across the country, particularly in the South.
“I thought that there’s enough grandstanding, enough speeches being made,” Mayor Catherine E. Pugh of Baltimore said at a news conference on Wednesday. “Get it done.”
Elsewhere, it was not so simple. From Birmingham, Alabama, to Gainesville, Florida, to Durham, North Carolina, to Lexington, Kentucky, local and state officials this week faced bitter divisions over Confederate statues. Many of the issues had been building for years but were now freshly volatile in the wake of the violence that exploded last Saturday in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Suddenly, it seemed, the questions of what to do with the roughly 700 remaining statues and monuments to the Lost Cause had come in for perhaps their hardest reckoning. At stake are not just the controversial pieces of public art but civic, political and racial issues now inextricably tied to them.
In Charlottesville, the violence left a 32-year-old woman dead after far-right protesters gathered to protest plans to move a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a local park.
And on Tuesday, President Donald J. Trump, in remarks defending some of the far-right protesters, asked whether the removal of Confederate statues would prompt the erasure of monuments to slaveholders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
Now local and state officials in states like North Carolina, Texas and Tennessee are facing the outrage of liberal and African-American constituencies, who say the statues should have never gone up in the first place, and the fury of some whites who fear their history is being erased.
On Wednesday night, Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia said that Confederate monuments in the state should be taken down, and he urged local and state leaders to move them into museums. Two years ago, McAuliffe argued in support of keeping the statues in public spaces, saying that “these are all parts of our heritage.”
In some cases, conservative Southern legislatures have passed laws preventing the statues’ removal or destruction.
In Birmingham, officials on Tuesday erected a black plywood barrier to block any view of the base of a Confederate obelisk that has loomed over a city park since 1905. Mayor William A. Bell Sr. said it was an attempt to respond to valid concerns while obeying a state law that effectively bans taking down Confederate monuments.
“What Charlottesville represented was an open defiance by hate groups of the tradition of this country to bring social and racial harmony,” Bell said in an interview at City Hall on Wednesday. “The condonement by the president of the actions of the alt-right, the white supremacists and the neo-Nazis gave a greater urgency to take some kind of action.”
The number of controversies has been remarkable: In Tennessee, Gov. Bill Haslam reiterated his opposition to a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a founder of the Ku Klux Klan, that is housed at the state Capitol.
In Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy, Mayor Levar M. Stoney said he believed the enormous Confederate statues on the city’s Monument Avenue should be removed, after saying as recently as Monday that they should stay up with additional context. In Texas, Houston officials opened a review of the city’s public art collection as part of an effort to decide whether Confederate statues should remain on public property.
The issue was not contained to the South: In Brooklyn, crews on Wednesday took down a plaque noting a place where Lee had once planted a tree.
In Montreal, a downtown department store, Hudson’s Bay, removed a plaque commemorating an 1867 visit by Jefferson Davis, who had been the president of the Confederacy.
The sense of urgency mirrors the reaction to the 2015 murders of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white supremacist, Dylann S. Roof.
But around the South in recent years, many others bristled at the idea that Confederate history was being erased.
Some flew Confederate battle flags out the back of their trucks, while others filed lawsuits to stop the removal of statues in places like New Orleans, where four statues were removed in May. A suit challenging Charlottesville’s planned removal of the Lee statue is pending.Here in Baltimore, there was little open protest: The city is politically liberal and 63 percent black. But there was nonetheless an abundance of caution. The four statues, which included a double equestrian statue of Lee and Stonewall Jackson, came down by 5:30 a.m.
Pugh, at a news conference on Wednesday, said that given the nation’s political climate, it was best to move “quickly and quietly” as a matter of public safety. “The mayor has the right to protect her city,” Pugh said later in an interview.
“For me, the statues represented pain, and not only did I want to protect my city from any more of that pain, I also wanted to protect my city from any of the violence that was occurring around the nation.”
Birmingham, like Baltimore, is a majority-black city, but the issue was more complicated. On Wednesday Alabama Attorney General Steven T. Marshall sued the city and asked a judge to impose a fine of $25,000 a day.
Marshall said the city’s plywood obstruction was in “violation of the letter and spirit of the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act.”