A Richmond man has been charged with vandalising a monument honouring Confederate president Jefferson Davis.
The news came a day after an activist scaled a flagpole outside the South Carolina statehouse in Columbia and took down a Confederate flag.
Confederate flags and monuments have been the focus of intense protests and media scrutiny since the shooting dead of nine African Americans in a Charleston, South Carolina, church on 17 June. The alleged gunman posed with the Confederate flag in photographs posted online with a racist “manifesto”.
Statues across the south have been vandalised with anti-racist messages.
On Saturday the chairman of Nascar – a bastion of southern culture – called the Confederate flag an “insensitive symbol” he personally found offensive and said the sport would be aggressive in disassociating the symbol from its events.
“We want to go as far as we can to eliminate the presence of that flag,” Brian France told the Associated Press. “I personally find it an offensive symbol, so there is no daylight how we feel about it and our sensitivity to others who feel the same way.
“We’re working with the industry to see how far we can go to get that flag to be disassociated entirely from our events.”
The governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, said the Confederate flag should be removed from the grounds of the statehouse, where it flies next to a monument to Confederate soldiers who died in the American civil war, which was fought from 1861 and 1865 and which resulted in the abolition of slavery in the US.
Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy. Police there said 39-year-old Joseph Weindl is accused of spray-painting an “L’’ on the Jefferson Davis monument’s granite base on Friday night. He is charged with misdemeanour destruction of property.
Police said in a Saturday night news release that Weindl admitted the vandalism. He denied an earlier vandalism of the monument.
Someone spray-painted the slogan “black lives matter” on the monument’s base on Thursday. Police said the investigation of that incident was continuing.
In Columbia, Bree Newsome, a 30-year-old youth organizer from Charlotte, North Carolina, was arrested with a helper, James Tyson, 30, also of Charlotte.
Both were charged with defacing monuments on state capitol grounds, a misdemeanor that carries a fine of up to $5,000 and a prison term of up to three years, or both. They were later released on bail.
The flag was flown again. Governor Haley said it would be down to the state’s legislators to ensure its removal.
