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Lone man in tie-dye defends Charlottesville Confederate monuments

Lone man in tie-dye defends Charlottesville Confederate monuments

To mourn the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer in Charlottesville two weeks ago, the Virginia city covered two of its Confederate monuments with black tarps on Wednesday. Heyer was killed when a man intentionally drove into a crowd of counterprotesters at the so-called “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally Aug. 12. The move comes after the Charlottesville City Counsel, with public input, voted unanimously earlier in the week to cover the monuments.

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Just hours after the tarps went up, a man wielding a knife attempted to cut them down. He later gave a speech to the surrounding crowd, describing the tarps as a “memorial to someone who was playing in traffic.”

Since the violence in Charlottesville, dozens of Confederate monuments have been removed, but there are still about 1,500 such monuments across the country, most erected decades after the Civil War.