North Carolina anti-white supremacy protesters took matters into their own hands on Monday by tying a rope around a nearly 100-year-old statue of a Confederate soldier and forcibly tearing it down from its pedestal.
The city of Durham in North Carolina, about 170 miles south of Charlottesville, became the scene of vigilante justice on Monday when anti-Confederate activists used a ladder to climb onto a Confederate statue and tie a cable around it to topple the bronze homage to an American Civil War hero.
The Confederate Monument, erected in 1924, was set high on a granite pedestal and fell head-first onto the ground below, completely crumpling into a heap of mangled alloy.
Tensions have been escalating across the United States following a violent skirmish that broke out on Saturday during a white supremacist rally to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan, including prominent white nationalist leaders such as David Duke and Richard B. Spencer, had gathered in Charlottesville's Emancipation Park surrounding a statue memorializing the leading Confederacy general.
According to a report in the New York Times, the white supremacists were protesting the city's plans to remove the statue after numerous requests by some residents and African-American civil rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P).
When thousands of anti-fascist counter-protesters clashed with the white nationalists in Charlottesville, the scene of the demonstration became one of acute violence.
The carnage peaked when self-confessed Nazi sympathizer, James Alex Fields Jr., deliberately drove his car into a group of activists, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring dozens more.
Emboldened by the actions of white supremacists, activists have been vandalizing and tearing down Confederate monuments across the south of America.
The crowd in Durham, North Carolina, gathered at the Confederate Soldiers Monument and cheered as the statue tumbled down and crumpled like a tin can.
The activists then spat on, kicked, and defiled the heap of copper and bronze where it now lay unrecognizable on the ground in front of an old city courthouse.
