Visitors denounce memorial grafitti

Tourists to the Lincoln Memorial in the US capital on Wednesday expressed unanimous disapproval of the vandalism done to the national monument while offering insights into the recent violence in Virginia.

A column at the rear of the memorial was still papered over on Wednesday, a day after it was discovered to have been spray-painted with an expletive. The graffiti was found three days after a deadly protest broke out in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the planned removal of a statue of the Civil War Confederate general Robert E. Lee.

"It's a tragedy to have our national monument vandalized," said Joshua Hiller, a young father visiting with his family from Florida. "There are other ways you can make your opinion heard. There's no need to go and vandalize the memorial, especially now with the National Park Service budget being cut the way it is."

The National Park Service said it was actively working to remove the graffiti, which was done with red spray paint.

Hiller also said it "makes quite a bit of sense" for some states to remove Confederate symbols.

Workers in Baltimore removed four monuments to the proslavery Confederacy before dawn on Wednesday as the city sought to avoid the sort of protests that occurred last weekend in Virginia.

The statues, including one of Lee and one of general Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, were dislodged from their bases in Baltimore's Wyman Park Dell and taken away on a flatbed truck after the City Council on Monday approved their removal, according to the report.

"I don't really think of the Confederate symbols as a great part of American history," Hiller said.

As Hiller was speaking, three park rangers and at least one Park Police officer were walking among droves of visitors inside the memorial to Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president (1861-65) who signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing slaves in the US.

Donald Blackett, a visitor from the United Kingdom, said vandalizing national heritage symbols isn't a good way of getting one's message out.

"If you've got opinions, you'd better find a better way to make them known," he said.

A woman visitor from Tennessee said: "I think we need to come together. ... I live at the place (Memphis) in which Martin Luther King was murdered. I have a deep understanding of the racial divide in our country.

"It's good (to remove the symbols) because they remind us of our history of slavery. I'm a product of that, and I went to the African American Museum recently, and I saw some things that I recognize. So I think it's time for us to move in a different direction."

Yuan Yuan in Washington contributed to this story.

huanxinzhao@chinadailyusa.com

(China Daily 08/18/2017 page11)