Given what happened in Charlottesville last weekend and the president’s latest not-so-tacit endorsement of white supremacists—in which he also expressed more concern about preserving monuments commemorating slave owners than the attacks on counter protesters by otherwise “fine people”—you might think that plans to remove statues dedicated to Confederate generals and the like have been temporarily shelved to prevent more violence from the so-called “alt-right.” But Baltimore is not playing with these neo-Nazis. After voting on Monday to take down monuments dedicated to Robert E. Lee, Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, and Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney (who wrote the majority decision on Dred Scott V. Sandford), the city executed the removals overnight, CNN reports.
There’s more, somewhat heartening (if long overdue) news: Lexington, Kentucky is poised to follow the lead of Baltimore and New Orleans, which rid itself of its last Confederate monument back in May. Of the 718 Confederate monuments the Southern Poverty Law Center catalogued last year, almost half of them can be found in Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina, which means there’s still plenty of work left to be done.