Protesters In Richmond Tear Down Statue Of Former Confederate Army General, Urinate On It

A group of protesters in Richmond, Virginia, toppled a statue of a Confederate general, reportedly splashing it with red paint and urinating on it after it had been torn to the ground.

As The Associated Press reported, the small group of protesters targeted the statue of Gen. Williams Carter Wickham in the city that once served as the capital of the Confederacy. The statue, which had stood since 1891, was located on a pedestal in the city’s Monroe Park. The incident came at the end of a day of peaceful protests in the city.

As the The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported, someone had tied a rope around the statute and pulled it down. The report noted that it was a small group of people who tore down the Confederate statue. They had remained in the park after a larger protest group had disbanded.

“Most of the protesters who had marched through the city Saturday night had already dispersed when the statue was taken down,” the report noted. “After it fell, one person urinated on the statue and then ran away.”

This is the latest instance of protesters targeting Confederate statues during nationwide demonstrations against police brutality and structural racism in the wake of George Floyd’s death while in police custody in Minneapolis. Other protesters have targeted these statues across the south and pressured leaders to bring them down.

As The Inquisitr reported, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced that a state-owned statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee would be coming down “as soon as possible.” Critics noted that Lee himself was against the idea of putting up monuments of the Civil War.

Earlier in the week, protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, tore down one Confederate statue and attempted to bring down a larger monument to the Confederate Army in the city’s Linn Park.

The report noted that the statue torn down in Birmingham was honoring Charles Linn, the namesake of the park and a founding father of the city of Birmingham who fought in the Confederate Army during the Civil War.

The protests that attempt to bring down Confederate statues follow several years of local and national efforts to have them brought down, spawned in large part by a mass shooting at a Charleston church in 2015 by Dylan Roof, a white supremacist who had the Confederate flag in his home.

In the wake of the mass killing, a number of state and local governments banned the flag, and efforts to tear down Confederate statues picked up steam.