NEW YORK (AP) — The Latest on the push to remove Confederate markers in New York City (all times local):
4:10 p.m.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says it’s time for the U.S. Army to rename two streets named for Confederate generals on an Army base in Brooklyn.
Cuomo sent a letter to Acting Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy on Wednesday. He says the streets named for Gens. Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson should be changed. He says it’s especially important following events in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a woman was killed while demonstrating against a white nationalist rally.
An email sent to the Army seeking comment was not immediately answered.
The streets named for the generals run through Fort Hamilton. Plaques commemorating Lee were also stationed nearby, on the grounds of a closed church where he was said to have once planted a tree. Those plaques were taken down Wednesday.
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11:30 a.m.
Leaders of a New York Episcopal diocese have removed two plaques honoring Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a church property in Brooklyn.
A spokeswoman for the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island says the plaques outside St. John’s Episcopal Church were removed Wednesday.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy markers commemorated the spot where Lee is said to have planted a tree while serving in the Army at Fort Hamilton in New York in the 1840s. Two decades later, he became commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.
The removal comes in the wake of last weekend’s deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacists protested plans to remove a Lee statue from a public park.
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