BALTIMORE _ Baltimore's Confederate monuments have been relegated to a city-owned lot, where they stood Thursday morning covered by tarps and under the protection of a police officer.
The statues, which were removed from their pedestals unannounced by the city before dawn Wednesday, face an uncertain future.
Mayor Catherine Pugh said she decided Tuesday morning to remove them "quickly and quietly" under cover of darkness to avoid any violent disturbances like the one in Charlottesville, Va., where a rally by neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists against the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee there turned deadly over the weekend.
A counterprotester in Charlottesville was killed when a neo-Nazi sympathizer drove his car into a crowd, and two police officers monitoring the scene died when their helicopter crashed.
In the wake of that encounter, the Baltimore City Council unanimously passed a resolution this week calling for the removal of the city's monuments to the Confederacy. Pugh decided the next morning to take them down.
The monuments included three featuring Confederate figures _ the Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson Monument in Wyman Park Dell, the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Mount Royal Avenue and the Confederate Women's Monument on West University Parkway.
A fourth monument, memorializing Chief Justice Roger B. Taney at Mount Vernon Place, was also removed Wednesday. Taney authored the Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case, which said blacks were not citizens.
In Annapolis, the Maryland State House Trust voted Wednesday to remove a statue of Taney from the lawn of the State House. It's unclear when that statue of Taney, a Maryland native, will be removed.
Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford, who represents Gov. Larry Hogan on the trust, House Speaker Michael E. Busch and Charles L. Edson, who represents the Maryland Historical Trust, voted by email to remove the statue. The trust's fourth member, Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller, did not immediately vote. He has said he does not support removing the statue but will not stand in the way if that's the governor's wish.
President Donald J. Trump, who has been criticized this week for saying blame for the Charlottesville violence was shared by both sides instead of condemning the white supremacist groups, weighed in on the removal of Confederate monuments in a series of tweets Thursday morning.
"Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments," the president wrote. "You can't change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson _ who's next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish!
"Also the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!"
Baltimore City Councilman Brandon Scott and others have suggested the Baltimore statues should be destroyed or melted down. That won't happen, Pugh spokesman Anthony McCarthy said Thursday.
Confederate symbols in Baltimore and nationwide faced a backlash after the 2015 killing of nine African-Americans at a church in Charleston, S.C., by white supremacist terrorist Dylann Roof.
Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Baltimore's mayor at the time, commissioned a task force to prepare a report on what to do with the city's monuments, but left the decision to Pugh, who was elected this past November.
The issue fell to the back burner amid a school budget shortfall, a spike in homicides and a Justice Department police-reform consent decree, among other issues, until the attack in Charlottesville this weekend.
Heather Heyer, 32, died and 19 others were injured when James Alex Fields Jr. rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters. Fields has been charged with second-degree murder and other charges.
More than 1,000 people held a rally in response at the Lee-Jackson Monument in Wyman Park Dell Sunday and marched through Charles Village, rebuking the white supremacists and calling for the monument's removal.
Some of those in the group said if the city didn't take down the statues, they would do it themselves _ a threat that Pugh said influenced her decision to move hastily and in secret. The mayor said she acted in the interest of safety.
Pugh, who personally oversaw the overnight removal of the monuments, has said she plans to form a working group to determine the monuments' fate, now that they're gone from their places of public display.
She has said she thinks plaques describing the monuments, and why they were removed, would be an appropriate replacement.
The mayor also said this week that she wanted to remove _ not destroy _ the monuments because she worried a public destruction could attract racist groups to Baltimore and spark another violent clash.
But no word yet on what will happen to the statues next.
"The working group will consider any proposals or requests to acquire the monuments," McCarthy said in an email.
