LOS ANGELES _ The Hollywood Forever Cemetery removed a monument commemorating Confederate veterans early Wednesday after hundreds of activists requested its removal and some threatened vandalism.
The move comes days after violence erupted at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., over the city's ordered removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The events triggered a national debate about similar monuments across the country.
Since 1925, the 6-foot monument has stood in the Confederate section of the cemetery, where more than 30 Confederate veterans, along with their families, are buried. The monument will be taken to a storage site within the next 24 hours, cemetery officials said, but the grave markers will remain.
This week, Hollywood Forever was fielding as many as 60 calls and emails a day from people requesting the cemetery get rid of the monument, said Tyler Cassity, the cemetery's president and co-owner. A Change.org petition calling for its removal drew more than 1,300 signatures.
On Tuesday, someone vandalized the granite boulder monument, Cassity said, using a black marker to write "No" across its bronze plaque.
Cassity said he reached out to the Long Beach chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which owns the monument and ultimately made the decision to take it down to prevent further acts of vandalism.
"I was afraid to leave it overnight," said a spokeswoman for the organization, who asked that her name not be used for fear of reprisal. "We have had the cemetery remove it until we decide what to do."
Those calling for the monument's removal are "erasing history," she said.
"I do not believe in slavery _ no sane human would believe in that today," she said. "But back then they did."
She condemned the violence in Virginia and expressed sorrow for those killed and injured.
"We weep for the people who are involved in all of the things that are going on in our country _ on both sides. We find hatred among white supremacists, we find hatred among Black Lives Matter," she said. "We should all come together and become one under the United States of America."
Cassity said he was relieved by the group's decision.
"I understood everyone's frustration, but I really felt like it wasn't our right to remove the monument. It's kind of against what we're supposed to be doing there, preserving history," Cassity said. "I think they made a wise decision given how quickly it escalated and what's happening right now in the country."
Over time, he said, the organization has been cooperative with the cemetery's requests to modify its annual memorial service. They've stopped doing reenactments, as well as bringing guns and Confederate flags.
"We feel they have a right to commemorate their dead, but Confederate flags and guns can be disturbing to our visitors," Cassity said.
Not many people knew about the monument, he said, until the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed about California's Civil War-era history this month.
The angry reaction to the piece escalated over the weekend when a white supremacist in Charlottesville plowed into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one woman, Heather Heyer, and injuring more than a dozen people.
