US Confederate Statues Removed, KKK Rally Denied Permit

Four confederate-era statues were removed in Baltimore, Maryland on Tuesday after the City Council voted for their immediate removal on Monday. 

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The four monuments removed in the city were the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Mount Royal Avenue, the Confederate Women’s Monument on West University Parkway, the Roger B Taney Monument on Mount Vernon Place, and the Robert E Lee and Thomas J “Stonewall” Jackson Monument in the Wyman Park Dell. 

The U.S.'s numerous slavery-era monuments came into the limelight after the violent far-right Charlottesville rally that claimed one life and left many injured. The white supremacist Virginia rally was organized to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E Lee, the Confederate army commander from northern Virginia. Maryland, a slave-owning state, remained in the union during the civil war, from 1861-65.

Georgia's Stone Mountain Park Association this week denied a request by the Ku Klux Klan to burn a cross in the park, which features a huge carving on the side of the mountain depicting Confederates Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis on horseback.

Joey Hobbs, a Georgia man, of the Sacred Knights’ Ku Klux Klan, had filed a request to hold a "lighting" ceremony on October 21 at the Georgia park with at least 20 participants.

The memorial group that oversees the park, said in a statement, it “condemns the beliefs and actions of the Ku Klux Klan and believes the denial of this Public Assembly request is in the best interest of all parties.”   

The request was to mark the revival of the founding of the second KKK in 1915 in the park that is known to be a site of 18th and 19th-century cross burnings. 
“This is a family-oriented park," John Bankhead, spokesman for the association told the Atlanta Journal-constitution, AJC, on Wednesday.  “We don’t want any of these groups at the park, quite frankly,” referring to white nationalists groups and the KKK.