They moved quickly and quietly

Baltimore didn’t mess around. Last night it took down all its Confederate statues and carried them away. Boom, done.

Confederate statues in Baltimore were removed from their bases overnight by city contractors, who used heavy machinery to load them onto flat bed trucks and haul them away — an abrupt end to more than a year of indecision on what to do with the memorials.

Mayor Catherine Pugh, who made the decision Tuesday morning to remove the monuments overnight, watched in person as the four statues linked to the Confederacy were torn from their pedestals.

“We moved quickly and quietly,” the mayor said. “There was enough grandstanding, enough speeches being made. Get it done.”

Men are always standing around yapping and arguing about whose turn it is. Women just get the damn job done.

The Council had already voted unanimously to take them down earlier in the week.

Crews removed the monuments unannounced, under cover of darkness between 11:30 p.m. and 5:30 a.m., in an effort to act quickly and avoid the potential for any violent conflicts similar to the ones in Charlottesville, Pugh said.

Protesters, who held a rally at the Robert E. Lee-“Stonewall” Jackson Monument at Wyman Park Dell near Johns Hopkins University Sunday, had pledged to tear down that statue themselves Wednesday night if the city didn’t. A group in Durham, N.C., toppled a Confederate statue there on Monday.

“It’s done,” Pugh said Wednesday morning. “They needed to come down. My concern is for the safety and security of our people. We moved as quickly as we could. … I did not want to endanger people in my own city.”

Done.

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