LA’s Hollywood Forever Cemetery to Take Down Confederate Monument

Confederate monuments across the country are being removed

Los Angeles’s famed Hollywood Forever Cemetery is removing its Confederate monument, it was announced Tuesday.

After receiving dozens of phone calls and emails from people requesting the monument be taken down, a Change.org petition with more than 1,300 signatures, and vandalism (the word “No” on the bronze plaque), the monument will be taken to a storage site within 24 hours, the cemetery’ officials told the LA Times on Tuesday night.

The six-foot tall granite boulder of a monument has been at the cemetery since 1925, in the Confederate section of the cemetery. It overlooks 30 Confederate veterans and their families’ grave sites. Grave markers will not be removed.

Approval for the removal was needed from the Long Beach chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which owns the monument. A spokeswoman for the organization told the LA Times they were afraid to leave it there overnight, and have had the cemetery remove it until they decide on the monument’s new home.

The decision to remove the monument comes after violent white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend, where KKK members and neo-Nazis were protesting the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. It has sparked a national conversation about the removal of Confederate monuments that still stand across the country.

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