There's Nothing New About Fighting Over Monuments

The Key Monument in Baltimore, a bronze figure of Francis Scott Key standing in a marble boat, has stood in the city’s Eutaw Place neighborhood since 1911. At 6:30 a.m. last Wednesday, workers from the Baltimore City Department of Recreation and Parks discovered it had been splattered in bright red paint. Spray painted on the side of the marble column next to Key were the words “Racist Anthem.”

The incident was part of a renewed wave of attention involving Baltimore’s public statues. It came a little over a month after Mayor Catherine Pugh took down four Confederate monuments in the early morning hours of August 16. Since then, protesters have also targeted a 225-year-old monument to Christopher Columbus in northeast Baltimore: a group of people smashed a sledgehammer into the stone panel at the base of the brick obelisk. The damage was first revealed in a YouTube video arguing that “tearing down monuments” is linked to “tearing down systems” that maintain white supremacy.