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Pressure builds in US to remove Confederate monuments
WASHINGTON: He stands in the middle of the street, his back to the nation’s capital, his gaze southwards towards the battlefields of the Civil War where his comrades fell.
Erected nearly 130 years ago, the bronze statue of an unarmed Confederate soldier sits at a busy intersection in Alexandria, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington.
The statue, named “Appomattox” for the site of the rebel surrender in 1865 after a devastating four-year conflict, is one of hundreds of similar monuments across the American South honouring the Confederate dead.