The shame is on the person who spray painted the memorial. You can destroy them, remove them and pretend that the Civil War NEVER happened BUT...you can't alter history, only in your own mind

'Shame' spray-painted on Confederate monument in Virginia

05/22/2017     The Norfolk City Council had decided against removing the monument in 2015.

Someone spray-painted the word “SHAME” in big yellow letters on the base of a Confederate monument in Norfolk, Virginia, making the city the latest to confront rising tensions over the preservation of such structures in public spaces.

Norfolk police are in the “preliminary stages of investigation” after officers responded to a vandalism report about 8:45 a.m. on Monday, department spokesman Daniel Hudson told HuffPost.

City workers removed the graffiti in less than two hours, Lori Crouch, the city’s corporate communications director, said.

NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — The word "shame" has been spray-painted on a Confederate monument in Virginia.

Media outlets report Norfolk police spokesman Daniel Hudson says officers were called to the vandalism site Monday morning.

The Norfolk City Council decided in 2015 to keep the monument, despite pressure from a local civil rights group. At the top of the monument is a statue of Confederate soldier Johnny Reb.

The monument, which features a 15-foot bronze Confederate soldier perched atop a granite base, “commemorates the last reunion of surviving Confederate soldiers,” according to the Downtown Norfolk Council’s website. It was unveiled in 1907.

Many see such monuments as symbols of white supremacism and the slavery system that the South fought to maintain. The push to rid public spaces of Confederate iconography gained momentum after the June 2015 massacre at historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where white supremacist Dylann Roof shot and killed nine black parishioners.

The Norfolk City Council, which included three black members at the time, decided against removing the downtown Confederate monument in September 2015. The black members agreed that removing the structure was unneccessary, The Virginian-Pilot reported.

Crouch said she wasn’t aware of any formal requests recently to have the city’s three Confederate statues taken down.

Norfolk Mayor Kenneth Cooper Alexander did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment.

Joe Dillard, president of the NAACP’s Norfolk Chapter, speculated the vandalism could have been inspired by news coverage of a contentious battle in Charlottesville, Virginia, over its city council’s decision to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

While Dillard said he believes the spray-painter in Norfolk was likely someone “disgusted and fed up with these monuments of hate,” he said his organization doesn’t condone the vandalism.