Crowd Pulls Down Confederate Statue in Washington, D.C. on Juneteenth

Protestors in the nation’s capital ended Juneteenth on an appropriate note yesterday by toppling the statue of a Confederate general.

A statue of Albert Pike—a senior officer in the Confederate army—erected near Judiciary Square in Washington D.C. in 1901 was the only outdoor memorial to a treasonous loser that existed in the District, according to a report from the Washington Post.

Videos posted on social media show a crowd of people using ropes to pull Pike down on Friday night:

Protestors later set fire to the statue, leading the President of the U.S. to lose his shit on Twitter and call for the perpetrators to be harshly punished for harming an inanimate monument to white supremacy:

Members of the D.C. Council—the local government in the District—have been lobbying Congress to remove the statue of Albert Pike since 1992, reported local station WUSA9.

Sometimes action is necessary when words have been repeatedly ignored.

And indeed, why should federal land—maintained through the funds of tax payers, among them black Americans—be used to honor a general of the Confederacy, a government established expressly to promote the idea that black people are inherently inferior to white people and to specifically oppose the values of the United States of America?

Pull that shit down. Let that shit burn.

The rest of Friday was marked by celebrations in the capital city as people gathered to commemorate the end of slavery in the U.S.

From WUSA 9:

Earlier in the day, crowds marched and rallied peacefully all across the city, from the National Museum of African American History and Culture to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, the newly named Black Lives Matter Plaza, on 14th and U Streets, and outside the White House.