While hundreds of neo-Nazis, White Nationalists, and violent demonstrators go free from this weekend’s riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, police have arrested a woman in North Carolina who took part in the removal of a confederate statue.
In response to the weekend’s violent racism, groups all across the south renewed their efforts to have symbols of the confederacy removed from their town squares and city centers. One such effort was succeeded on Monday when a group of protesters successfully toppled a civil war monument using a rope and teamwork.
During a protest held in Durham, North Carolina, members of the Workers World Party used a ladder and rope to pull down a monument to Confederate soldiers stationed outside the Durham County courthouse. The event was captured on video, and that video is now being used to identify suspects.
One of the women who admitted to helping tear down the statue, student Takiyah Thompson, was arrested for her role on Tuesday and faces felony and misdemeanor riot and disorderly conduct charges.
Officers said they are choosing now to identify and arrest suspects rather than arresting them at the scene for the sake of public safety.
Statues like these are protected as “history” by those who support them, but many, including the one destroyed in Durham, were created long after the Civil War as an attempt to romanticize and rewrite history. The statue Thompson was arrested for helping to destroy was put in place in 1924, more than a century after the war it memorialized.
Meanwhile and elsewhere, police’s inaction in Charlottesville means that nearly none of the violent attackers on the side of White Nationalists have been arrested, and the public has been forced to step in to try and bring these attackers to justice.
