Woman hangs ‘second place’ banner on Phoenix Confederate memorial
Aug 17, 2017, 4:20 AM | Updated: 9:10 am
(Imgur Photo)
PHOENIX — A woman hung several banners on a Confederate memorial in Phoenix on Tuesday that read “second place” and “participant.”
BuzzFeed News reported the banners were hung on the memorial in Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza, which is across the street from the state capitol building near 17th Avenue and Washington Street, by Gilbert activist Rachel McHood.
Another message read, “You lost. Get over it.”
She said she decided to hang the messages after President Donald Trump’s Tuesday press conference in which he said both sides were at fault for a violent white supremacists protest in Virginia.
“I’m a white person and Trump does not speak for me,” she told the website. “So I felt like it was really important for me to not say silent, to say something.”
McHood said a police officer told her she could not attach anything to the memorial, so she simply laid the banners on it. They were removed by Wednesday morning.
McHood, who said she was a lifelong Republican, said she discussed the idea with friends who were involved in the Black Lives Matter movement before hanging the banners.
She said her party had a duty to denounce racism because failing to do so was immoral.
“I’m a white person with blond-haired, blue-eyed kids,” she told BuzzFeed news. “So whatever Trump does, it’s not going to hurt me, but it’s going to hurt my neighbors and people that I love. To be racist is un-American.”
The Phoenix memorial was targeted again Thursday morning, when it was spray-painted by a man.
The unrest in Virginia began Friday night, when a group of so-called “alt-right” protesters surrounded a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Charlottseville that the city planned to remove.
The protests carried over into the next day. A counter-protester was killed when a man drove his car into a crowd.
Two police officers monitoring the events died when their helicopter went down.
Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey condemned white supremacists after the protest, but said he did not plan to remove Confederate memorials on state land until the public said otherwise.
“We have a public process for this,” he said. “If the public wants to be engaged in this, I’d invite them to get engaged in it.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.