Under a 1904 state law that was amended in 1997 to apply to cities, local governments have the authority to authorize the building of war memorials, but they are forbidden from removing, damaging or defacing them. (After the rally, the council voted to also remove the statue of Jackson; the lawsuit was then amended to include both statues.) “It’s based on a flawed law, so the law doesn’t make much difference; it was a public process, it was a lawful process, so that’s our case,” he said. The city argued in a court filing in January that the law did not apply to these statues because they were not really war memorials. “The statues were part of a regime of city-sanctioned segregation that denied African-Americans equal access to government and public spaces,” attorneys for the city wrote.

Source: New York Times May 01, 2019 09:00 UTC