The Charlottesville, Va., city council voted in February to take down a Gen. Robert E. Lee statue — the stated reason for last weekend’s white-supremacist events in the storied Virginia college town — and the mayor of another noted southern college town, Lexington, Ky., said Charlottesville’s experience led him to accelerate plans for the removal of Confederate monuments there. “We cannot let them define our future,” he tweeted.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, according to an Associated Press report, has calculated that, as of this spring, at least 1,503 statues, monuments, parks, schools and other entities honoring Confederate idols existed nationwide — clustered in the South.

Protesters in Durham County, N.C., took down a statue Monday through extralegal means, and are being pursued by law-enforcement officials. And Baltimore’s mayor is pushing forward with a plan to purge her city of such symbols — and, in fact, took aggressive action on the matter after midnight Wednesday, as the New York Times reported.

Another big-city mayor from the South, Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans, is seeing his May remarks on the removal of four Confederate monuments from the Crescent City landscape come in for a fresh look and significant social-media dissemination in Charlottesville’s wake. One notable line among many:

“ ‘Instead of revering a four-year, brief, historical aberration that was called the Confederacy, we can celebrate all 300 years of our rich, diverse history [as] a place named New Orleans and set the tone for the next 300 years.‘ ” — Mayor Mitch Landrieu, New Orleans

A “bubbling” multicultural “cauldron” personifying “E pluribus unum,” New Orleans, he said, was also an enormous slavery market with a particularly checkered history on race. The statues taken down served as a daily reminder to some residents of a history and a mindset that denied their humanity — and that was not, he said, by mistake. The people who put them up, not during or even immediately after the Civil War, meant to send a message, in Landrieu’s view.

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“It is self-evident that these men did not fight for the United States of America. They fought against it.”