Soon to be a top tourist destination while visiting Baltimore.
Via Baltimore Sun:
More than 200 local residents and elected leaders gathered in a tree-lined corner of a Baltimore park Saturday to rededicate the space, which had long venerated two Confederate generals, to the famed abolitionist and Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman.
“We stand on the shoulders of this great woman,” said Ernestine Jones-Williams, 71, a Baltimore County resident and a Tubman family descendant who spoke on behalf of the family. “We are overwhelmed. Overwhelmed. Thank you, and God bless you.”
The ceremony in Wyman Park Dell, on the 105th anniversary of Tubman’s death, took place feet from the now-empty pedestal of a large, bronze, double-equestrian statue of Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and officially renamed the space Harriet Tubman Grove.
The statue had stood in the park since 1948, but was removed in August amid a national debate and protests over Confederate symbolism and monuments, and how they are viewed by those who see them as offensive reminders of the country’s racial history and those who proudly consider them a part of their Southern heritage.[…]
City Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke called Tubman, who was born a slave on Maryland’s Eastern Shore but went on to lead many other enslaved people to freedom along the Underground Railroad, a “heroine and beacon for all ages.”
Marvin “Doc” Cheatham, a longtime, local civil rights leader who has been working to get Tubman recognized in more official ways across the city for years, thanked the community for its work in renaming the grove.
“You did what needed to be done to say, ‘Yes, we need to move on,’ ” he said.
Jackson Gilman-Forlini, 28, of the city’s Abell neighborhood, who is studying how society re-contextualizes monuments and memorials over time as part of a master’s degree program in historic preservation at Goucher College, said the rededication was a great thing for the city. He served on the task force formed by Pugh last year to study the removal of the city’s Confederate monuments.
“Monuments are seen as permanent, sort of monolithic structures, but inherently their meanings change over time, and really the removal of these monuments was not so much about monuments in general, but about the kind of values that we as a society want to promote,” said Gilman-Forlini, who also works for the city as a historic preservationist. “This is now the next logical step in the process of asserting those values, those positive values of inclusion, of tolerance, of speaking out against prejudice.