Five days into Black History Month, the Baltimore City Council approved the legislation to move forward with plans to rededicate the site where confederate monuments once stood in Wyman Bell Park to legendary abolitionist Harriet Tubman.
Before being removed in 2017, the site included a monument that honored confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, which had originally been built in 1948. Including Lee and Jackson, the city has removed a total of four confederate monuments.
Photo credit: Christina Tkacik/Baltimore Sun
“Just as Harriet Tubman led hundreds from slavery and hundreds of Union soldiers during the Civil War, she is now helping lead Baltimore’s reclamation of our four former confederate sites, as a place of community gathering and peaceful contemplation,” wrote City Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke in an email to “The News-Letter.”
According to the John Hopkins Newsletter, the site will be rededicated as the “Harriet Tubman Grove” on March 10. As a c is a step in the right direction.
“I thought it was a pretty progressive and appropriate step given that we have a very diverse community,” Sloan said.
He sees public monuments as representative of the ideas that a society believes in and thinks that the City should destroy them.
“A monument shows that we’re proud of the history that it represents. I don’t think that we’re proud of slavery. So we shouldn’t commemorate the people that fought for it,” Sloan said.